Speaking from experience, I had Netflix for years without thinking about it, starting at $8/month. At that price I didn't care if I watched it or not. Then it went to $10, $12, etc. Once it got to $15-16 (I forget), I cancelled it.
I now sign up for 1-2 months a year to catch up on shows I like and just rotate which streaming services I have. Yes, this is anecdotal.
It's hard to find data on how common rotating streaming services is. I would guess not common. I found this from 2021 showing the number of streaming services the average US household has [1]. It's worth noting that this was based on lockdown-era data.
The number if still quite high. I still have 3-4 mainly because my ISP gives me 1 and Amazon Prime bundles it. Were it not for those, I'd probably stick with 2. This is imperfect data because is it the same 4 or are some or all of these rotated? We just don't know.
Most of the data around this is how streaming is cannibalizing satellite and cable. But at this rate Netflix will cost $30+ in 10-15 years. Will it still have growing revenue and the same subscriber numbers? There is price elasticity here.
This makes sense to me as a strategy for most users.
I cancelled a year or two ago, but not for the price changes alone. I didn't like the new interface much, and I found myself endlessly scrolling through the same things looking for stuff to watch.
I'm not sure if Netflix vastly removed most of its content, or they just made discoverability a nightmare, but it felt often like I 'ran out of stuff to watch.'
It's hard to justify 20 something a month for what is essentially a few 6 episode shows that will last one season, and maybe 4 or 5 passable movies in a year. It seems rather silly to me to pay for that all year.
I think this is a lot more common and I suspect people decide to do monthly and that they'll cancel after catching up on shows ... and then they don't cancel. So I'm sure the streaming services don't care that people do this because they might come out ahead anyways.
This argument is a bit scattered. "Rent seeking" is being misused here. It's a relatively new term (~50 years old) but it has a lot of history behind it, specifically with enclosures. The Enclosure Acts [1] were a series of laws that took what was common property open to all and made them private property. This was embryonic capitalism [2].
Anyway, I remember that Google demo of making restaurant reservations. I believe it was scripted and had a human fallback. Little did we know that Google would drop the bag on the whole transformer thing that came out soon after. I wouldn't be surprised if it was some of the same people involved.
What the author is talking about isn't rent-seeking per se but a moat. The entire proposition of OpenAI is that they can build a moat and recoup the billions of investment. I'm not convinced that's true, which is part of the author's point, for some of the same reasons:
1. Cost of hardware and training and tokens keeps going down. We saw the same thing with Bitcoin mining. I wonder if we'll see ASICs enter the fray here too; and
2. China will make sure no one company owns this future. DeepSeek was a shot across the bow of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. It is a national security issue for China.
Where I disagree is that this will be an end for the rent-seeking class. I think we're bouldering towards a dystopian future of even more wealth concentration where most people get displaced by automation and AI, which suppresses wages and ultimately leads to a situation where a handful of people have all the money and almost everyone else has no money.
> This argument is a bit scattered. "Rent seeking" is being misused here.
It's being used in a more literal-meanings-of-the-words sense ("pursuing monopoly rents") rather than the narrow economic term-of-art sense of "pursuing monopoly rents through influence over public policy by means that do not create, or which inhibit the creation of, additional wealth" (the definition you seem to be complaining about it not adhering to without actually providing.)
But most of the usages would also be correct in the narrower sense, because virtually ever actor referred to as rent-seeking in the broader sense are also rent-seeking in the narrow sense as part of that. (E.g., actively lobbying for "safety" regulation which would disproportionately impair non-incumbent new competitors.)
> What the author is talking about isn't rent-seeking per se
but a moat.
Pursuing a moat is just another term for seeking monopoly rents by any means, including rent-seeking in the narrow sense.
(There's also obviously an ideological angle in creating the term "rent seeking" as a term of criticism to those seeking monopoly rents through means that the creators of the term disapprove of, excluding seeking the same kind of rents by other means from "rent seeking".)
No, a moat is a competitive advantage/ OpenAI in particular is predicated on the belief that they will have a compeitive advantage. ASML is a compeitive advantage with EUV (for now). You can overcharge for if you have a compeititve advantage but that's not the same as rent-seeking.
Rent-seeking is fundamentally intermediation like a health insurer putting themselves between a patient and a healthcare provider or privatizing grazing lands or controlling water supplies from snowmelt (like the Resnicks) or privatizing trains in the UK.
Microsoft has a compeitive advantage with Windows, Google with its search engine and the ad business that funds it, Amazon with AWS or NVidia with GPUs. There are alternatives to all of these things but these companies maintain dominance with a combination of scale, cost, technology and network effects. That's not rent-seeking in a broad or narrow sense.
Rent-seeking would be Microsoft lobbying lawmakers to require schools and governments to purchase Windows, for example.
No, a moat is a barrier to people closing the gap of an existing competitive advantage. The barrier is literally the point of the metaphor. If there is no barrier, there is no moat, just a transitory advantage; that's the whole basis of the famous "we have no moat and neither does OpenAI" memo at Google; its not that the big established players had (at that time, or now) no current competitive advantage over open source competition, its that there was no structual barrier preserving it.
> Rent-seeking is fundamentally intermediation
No, rent-seeking is using influence over public policy as a means to extracting monopoly rents. State policy favoring intermediation is one manner of rent seeking, yes.
> Rent-seeking would be Microsoft lobbying lawmakers to require schools and governments to purchase Windows, for example.
That is an example, but lobbying for specific mandates for purchases from the specific firm is a fairly extreme case of rent-seeking, not the general case; a more common for of rent-seeking is firms in a narrow group of leading incumbents lobbying for various standards (either for public market access or government contracts) to be set for the industry that are not a particular burden for existing large firms to meet but which create additional friction for new competitors. In the specific case of software, this can include lobbying for rules that specifically treat open source solutions as suspect and dangerous, as well.
> If there is no barrier, there is no moat, just a transitory advantage
A moat can very much be transitory and caused by natural (or at least, not specifically intended) factors. Perhaps we could then call it something different, like a river as opposed to a moat, but the strategic effect is the same either way so it makes sense to use the established term for it.
I saw someone say recently "hobbies are a luxury" and I tend to agree.
Think back decades ago and you had a single person or a family supported by a single income who could afford the rent or to buy their house and put their kids through college.
By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working.
Then people started having multiple jobs. This was in part because employers didn't want to employ people full-time as they'd have to offer benefits, most notably health insurance.
And the last 10+ years has taken this further where we now have "side gigs" or "side hustles" or people who are desperate to be "influencers" or "Youtubers" or whatever. Any hobby you have needs to be monetized to get by. You have to sell something, even if it's advice on how to do the thing.
That's what's meant by "hobbies are a luxury". It means you're earning enough not to need to monetize some portion of your life. And the number of people who can do that is continually decreasing.
The problem is capitalism. If you have a hobby, the capital owners haven't loaded you with enough debt (student, medical, housing). You're too independent. You may do unacceptable things like demand raises and better working conditions or, worse yet, withhold your labor. You're spending at least some of your time not creating value for some capital owner to exploit.
Every aspect of our lives is getting financialized so somebody else can get wealthier. Every second of your time and thing you do needs to be monetized and exploited.
Gambling isn't a net negative for society. It's just a negative. There are no positive aspects to it. Gambling addicts are incredibly likely to commit suicide. It's incredibly destructive.
> By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working.
True, but somewhat misleading. This includes parents that work part-time. If we only include full-time work then it's never been over 50%. Largely this reflects the second wave of feminism and women being able to get jobs they want!
> Then people started having multiple jobs. This was in part because employers didn't want to employ people full-time as they'd have to offer benefits, most notably health insurance.
Employers tend to prefer full-time employees because they are more efficient. There are a lot of fixed costs for each employee and you'd rather get the max number of hours out of them. It's actually quite hard to get a part-time job in many fields. It's true that part-time employment has gone up but again I think this is largely good! And in any case the ratio of part-time employees has barely changed since the 1960s: ~17% today vs ~13% back then. So it's hardly the typical case.
> The problem is capitalism. If you have a hobby, the capital owners haven't loaded you with enough debt (student, medical, housing). You're too independent. You may do unacceptable things like demand raises and better working conditions or, worse yet, withhold your labor. You're spending at least some of your time not creating value for some capital owner to exploit.
Silly Marxist voodoo economics. Most people work in services where there aren't really "capital owners". ~50% of Americans work for small businesses that hardly fit that model either.
> Employers tend to prefer full-time employees ...
They don't [1][2].
> Most people work in services where there aren't really "capital owners". ~50% of Americans work for small businesses that hardly fit that model either.
Small businesses absolutely fit the model, specifically "petite bourgeoisie" [3]. The problem with small business owners is they think they're capital owners (or will be someday) so they vote for the interests of capital owners but most small businesses are just jobs you have to buy with typically less pay and less security.
This is a trite response that doesn't engage with what was originally stated.
The double edged brilliance/danger of capitalism is that it constantly opens up and moves into new markets. This is good, it means once the market determines a need, capital investment can accelerate production of the good that meets that need.
But the flip side is it is coming for everything. Everything will be marketized and monetized and accelerated and made efficient. And there are genuine problems with that.
Regulation has been the historical response, but we've seen concentrated wealth chip away at regulations for decades or even rip them apart overnight.
This is a contradiction that needs to be resolved. One can be pro-capitalism or anti-capitalism and come to the same conclusion.
> we've seen concentrated wealth chip away at regulations for decades or even rip them apart overnight.
There are more and more regulations every day. Oil refineries are being abandoned in California due to regulations so heavy there's no way for them to operate anymore. A friend of mine pulled his business out of California due to stifling regulations.
> Everything will be marketized and monetized and accelerated and made efficient.
I give my unwanted items to the thrift store rather than the landfill. Others sell it on eBay. This is monetizing/making things more efficient. And it's good.
but not universally. oil refineries were causing asthma and environmental degradation.
them moving to another state is a regulatory failure (they shouldn't have another jurisdiction to move to, they should just operate without imposing negative externalities on others, spelling of the refineries).
what value is clean air? what is the value of a human life? how much is your attention worth?
these are questions that capitalism should not answer, but will nevertheless try to.
Socialist economies are much more environmentally destructive, because they are so inefficient they cannot afford the luxury of being environmentally cleaner.
The problem isn't capitalism. That's just poor thinking from someone who has spent too much time thinking about political ideology. The problem is how we finance campaigns combined with gerrymandering. And if you want proof, look at corruption in communist and formerly communist countries. It makes the US look like a bunch of choir boys by contrast. Thinking that it is about capitalism is just an attempt to wedge in some political ideology into a practical problem of governance and a sign someone has never actually had to lead real humans before.
> By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working.
This is caused by the government sucking up ever larger portions of the economy, while also constricting it with ever more onerous regulations. It has to be paid for somehow.
The tl;dr here is, with all due respect, that your premises are basically all wrong.
> (1) reducing oil shipments to China is good posturing for the US
No, it isn't. For several reasons:
1. China has stockpiled ~1.4 billion barrels of oil. it'a net importer. Supplies from Russia aren't disrupted. At present, Iranian oil is still gointg to China;
2. China is rapidly decreasing its dependence on fossil fuels with renewable energy projects on a scale where they're building more solar, for example, than the rest of the world combined. They also produce those panels so there's no supply chain risk there;
3. While the US is a net oil exporter, it's not universal. California, for example, has no pipelines so 75% of its oil comes from the sea. ~20-25% of that comes from Iraq and is disrupted by the Strait being closed;
4. Qatar produces 20-30% of the world's Helium supply and ~20% of the world's LNG, both of which are disrupted;
5. ~30% of the world's fertilizer is disrupted by the Strait being closed. The US is way more impacted by fertilizer disruption than China is.
> (2) Iran isn't the only one who can control passage throught the strait. All gulf countries can do so.
The other Gulf states are US client states. Why would Saudi Arabia close the Strait, which especially hurts US interests?
I also doubt any of them can to the same degree. The entire Iranian military is geared towards this strategy with drone and ballistic missile production on a scale no other country is really built for. It has hardened military infrastructure designed for decades to resist US bombardment.
Other Gulf states don't have this hardened infrastructure and are more vulernable to Iranian attack if it came down to it. Take desalination plants as an example. Yes Iran has those too but Iran also has significant snow melt as a source of water, Mountains, remember? Iran has ski resorts they have that much snow.
> Russia invading Ukraine and failing
Russia has basically succeeded. You have fairly stagnant battle lines where neither side can particularly advance but Russia holds certain Ukrainian territory now for years. Russia is just going to wait for the West to get bored and give up. Russia's economy has proven itself to be surprisingly resilient.
Sanctions just don't work on enemies like Iran, Russia or North Korea as well as they do on allies or former allies because enemies have an entire national project to resist American imperialism. They have to be self-reliant in a way that allies just don't.
This is also why the US client states in the Gulf are hurting way more from the Strait being closed: their economies aren't built for it. Iran's is.
> ... the weakened China (due to oil constraints) would be simply unable to attack in 2028, the strategic window when it can do so.
So this is where you've really gone off the deep end. China is less affected by this, in part because of long-term strategy but short-term because Chinese shipments are still going through the Strait.
American imperialists (which is both Republicans and Demorats, for the record) have this weird idea that China will invade Taiwan. Or wants to. Or it can. None of those things are true.
It really feels like projection, like every accusation is a confession. China must be doing violent imperialism because that's what the US is doing.
China can blockade Taiwan but that won't really do anything any more than an aerial bombardment will do anything to Iran. China doesn't have the amphibious capability to land an invasion on Taiwan any more than the US does in Iran. If you think otherwise, I'm sorry but you're gorssly mistaken.
But all of that ignores the real issue: China doesn't need to invade (or blockade) Taiwan. Why? Because all but ~10 countries in the world already view Taiwan as part of China. In the US (and Europe) it's called the One China policy. It is US government policy and consistent across both parties.
Why would China upset the international order when everybody already agrees with them?
China's built strategy suggests they want to invade Taiwan. What else are those bridge barges for?
And yeah, it's a dumb idea, but Taiwan, unification in general, seems to be one of the handful of things China can't quite manage to be rational about. They didn't have to grab Hong Kong ahead of time either.
There are three things people often don't seem to realize about invasions:
1. What a barrier water is still to this day;
2. How many troops it would take to occupy a country; and
3. The logistics required to support an invasion.
Knowing these things, even a little bit, can dispel a lot of fearmongering nonsense one will see.
On a clear day, you can see the white cliffs of Dover from Calais, France. I believe at its narrowest point the English Channel is 17 miles wide. At its peak the German army in WW2 had ~10 million soldiers and a massive industrial war machine. Yet they couldn't cross the English Channel. They didn't even try.
The Allies did manage D-Day but mostly because German strategy was bad, they were asleep at the wheel and D-Day was logisitcally probably the most complex military operation in human history and it took years to plan.
Look at a map of Ukraine and see where the front line is. The Dnipro River will feature strongly along much of it. That's not a coincidence. To cross even a river you need pontoon bridges to get tanks across and then trucks for supplies. Those bridges can be built quickly but the entire operation and any bridgehead you establish is incredibly vulernable to attack.
100 miles of ocean separates the Chinese mainland from Taiwan. It may as well be 10,000. Or 10. It just doesn't matter.
Taiwan has 1-2 million soldiers (including reserves) and a national project to resist an invasion and occupation. China would probably need at least 1-2 million troops to occupy Taiwan and they would have to get them across the ocean and them supply and arm them.
China simply doesn't have that amphibious capability and Taiwan could play havoc with their supply lines.
I really wish more people would ask "what would an invasion of Taiwan take or look like?" because then we could all waste less time worrying about things that just aren't going to happen. You could reduce any scenario to "can they?", "do they need to?" and "do they want to?". The answer to all three is "no".
Creating fear of this is just another tactic to sell weapons and, to some extent, more revealing about the Western imperialist psyche.
So no, I don't care about what barge ships China is building. At all. It doesn't matter.
> On a clear day, you can see the white cliffs of Dover from Calais, France. I believe at its narrowest point the English Channel is 17 miles wide. At its peak the German army in WW2 had ~10 million soldiers and a massive industrial war machine. Yet they couldn't cross the English Channel. They didn't even try.
Notably they were in a position of air inferiority the whole time, despite certain popular perceptions. So not really comparable. (Indeed if China, by contrast, is making preparations for an amphibious invasion, surely that says something)
> Look at a map of Ukraine and see where the front line is. The Dnipro River will feature strongly along much of it. That's not a coincidence. To cross even a river you need pontoon bridges to get tanks across and then trucks for supplies. Those bridges can be built quickly but the entire operation and any bridgehead you establish is incredibly vulernable to attack.
That the front in a somewhat evenly balanced war would stabilise on a natural obstacle isn't so surprising. We can't leap from there to say that such natural obstacles would make for stable defensive lines in a less balanced war.
Everything you say is probably true and I agree... and yet.
What matters is not just what you plan to do, but what your opponent thinks you'll do. The US in general believes that China wants to invade or control Taiwan in some way. This mere belief is sufficient to cause it to take action.
> Take desalination plants as an example. Yes Iran has those too but Iran also has significant snow melt as a source of water, Mountains, remember? Iran has ski resorts they have that much snow.
Iran has suffered six consecutive years of drought, which has been bad enough that they were considering (before the war) moving the capital from Tehran to Makran on the coast of the Caspian
"Take desalination plants as an example. Yes Iran has those too but Iran also has significant snow melt as a source of water, Mountains, remember? Iran has ski resorts they have that much snow."
Iran is in a dire situation with its water supply. It used to rely on an ancient system of ancient Qanat wells that only provide a fixed amount of water that can't be overdrawn, but in their quest to be self sufficient in terms of food they have gone to groundwater instead. The Qanats haven't been maintained so their output has reduced, probably permanently to some extent, and the ground water table is running dry to the extent that they are considering moving their capital.
I mostly agree with everything you say, I just see the balance lying elsewhere on the spectrum. I think China is on it's way to securing its energy supplies with renewables but not quite there, and that the US is taking this window of opportunities to do what it can to attempt to degrade China.
Whether China plans to actually invade or blockade Taiwan or not doesn't matter if the US thinks it will. AFAICT the US is convinced it will, and the mere threat of this is enough to justify Venezuela and Iran, I believe. Higher oil prices are less worse than no more semiconductors.
And I think Russia might have gained some territory, but at the cost of being completely sucked into the conflict, having lost strategically by (1) being unable to support and defend its proxies and (2) having its arsenal and technology thoroughly analyzed and proven ineffective against US weapons. All actors involved know this and it will not remain, but until solved this means that the US knows it can strike countries defended by Russian weapons, at least until counter measures are researched, developed and distributed. This is a temporary advantage and moment of clarity that lasts a few years, not a sustained advantage.
The risk of the US being equally sucked into Iran and suffering the same fate is very high. And China's best strategy here is probably to sit and wait and help US opponents keep the US busy for a while, like the US did on Ukraine with Russia.
The US is an arms dealer empire. It's economic strength and power come from its ability to sell weapons. The military budget is pushing $1 trillion (and probably will exceed it with supplemental funding for the Iran boondoggle). Rumor has it the administration will be asking for $1.5 trillion in the next Budget. That is a staggering and utterly unsustainable level of spending. Most of that is going to defense contractors.
The US doesn't want to live in a multipolar world. It wants to remain the hegemonic global superpower, basically to make a handful of really wealthy people even more wealthy at the expensive of everyone else.
So do I believe the US wants to treat China like an enemy that "needs" to be degraded? Absolutely. Do I think it should be that way or has to be that way? Absolutely not. But that is a minority position in US political circles. One thing the Republicans and Democrats are united on is the US imperialist project.
You have a handful of candidates like Graham Platner who think the path forward with China is one of cooperation not competition [1]. The Democratic Party, just like the Republican Party, hates this kind of rhetoric. That's what we're dealing with.
Part of selling that is convincing everyone is that China is or wants to do the exact same imperialism that the US is doing. What's China actually doing? The Belt and Road Initiative [2] where China basically sues its massive trade surplus to go around the world and build ports, airports and roads and to fund mines, farms, power plants and oil and gas. All on significantly better terms than the World Bank and IMF offer [3], so much so that Africa is considered "lost" to US interests in favor of China.
Fun fact: the United States Africa Command is headquartered in Germany [4]. Why? Because no African country wants it. It's one region where the US only has a handful of bases (eg Djibouti, Kenya).
When the country that produces most of the world's weapons is telling you that there's some big military threat that can only be solved by selling more weapons I just ask: consider the source.
You have to be corrected on a few critical things. The US' power doesn't come from it making so many weapons. The structure of the government. The principles it stands for. The geographic perfection it lucked into. The allies it has (which, despite appearances, are still there.) The economic influence it has. The human talent it has soaked up from around the world as people moved to the US.
China can't replicate any of those things in the next 100 years. They are also handicapped by their ideology, which weakens their capacity to work the necessary logic for critical outcomes. They've tried and failed to achieve some kind of belt and road initiative to make up a bit of the difference in their supply chain dependencies. They've tried and failed to clone so many of our technologies, but what gets promoted are the ones they've succeeded at.
One of the admirals in the Pacific said something along the lines of (paraphrasing), "China is complaining that we're trying to contain them. My question to them would be, 'well, do you need to be contained?'"
China constantly contradicts itself about its ambitions. What you need to understand, from all this stuff you've been writing in this thread, is that China is no longer China. That great history, so much of its critical culture from the past. It's all trashed. China is now communist. It's now what communism wants, not what China wants or needs. Taiwan isn't about reunification with a brother, it's about communists crushing democracy.
If you look back at World War 2, it was in large part caused by communism. Comintern believed that communism could not co-exist with capitalism, so communism would have to be established globally. This threatened Japanese and German sovereignty. Granted, the Japanese and Germans had their own ideological problems, but just the threat of global communist expansion was enough to start a race for global resource control.
We downplay this about WW2, but if you want to understand anything about US national strategy, it is that we have been hedging our resource control against a potential flaring up of global communist ambitions again.
Now what is China doing? They're building the largest military in history that has no use other than expanding. Xi Jinping is purging his military like Stalin did before he invaded Poland and Finland.
The contradiction about communist ideology is that it is anti-western and anti-imperialism, but the success of communism is that it has to become western to suck less and it has to manufacture a psychological empire to succeed. Western "empires" have largely been a result of good fortune in water access. The US is the absolute pinnacle of that. Russia and China are worse off and since they are at a disadvantage there, the alternative is psychological expansion.
China is trying to make up the difference by using a massive population, but the entire logic around it is weak. China is easy to choke off and scale down. It would go the same way World War 1 and World War 2 went, except with more turmoil in each other's countries. It's easier now than ever to project power from inside enemy's countries than to need to send ships and missiles thousands of miles to reach them. The issue is that, China is more fragile in this regard than the US is in every regard despite all their social controls.
> The US' power doesn't come from it making so many weapons. The structure of the government. The principles it stands for.
This is high school propaganda. It's classic "they hate us because of our freedom" nonsense.
What principles? America was established on white supremacy, slavery, genocide, religious intolerance and exploitation. The government we formed was by and for wealthy white slaveowners.
Do you know when the last slave ship survivor died? It was 1940. Slavery survived in practice well beyond Emancipation. Forced servitude existed up until 1941 [1] and that only happened because of the propaganda threat from World War 2.
You're right about the geographical "luck" (other than, you know, the whole genocide part of it).
> [China is] also handicapped by their ideology
No, they're not. The reason the US goes after communist and socialist governments so vehemently is because any success threatens capitalism, not the other way around. If these systems were all doomed to fail, why can't we simply serve as a good example? Why do we need to militarily intervene, overthrow governments and starve countries that dare do anything different? Don't you find that odd?
China has transformed itself over recent decades and brought ~800 million people out of extreme poverty in the last century. All while living conditions and infrastructure crumbles in the West.
> One of the admirals in the Pacific said something along the lines of (paraphrasing), "China is complaining that we're trying to contain them. My question to them would be, 'well, do you need to be contained?'"
I don't know what point you think you're making with this. It can just as easily be used to justify imperialism because "we don't like anyone else succeeding". What kind of argument is that? If anyone needs to be contained, it's the US military, actually.
> China is now communist.
This isn't really true in practice. Sure it's the Chinese Communist Party and you may see labels like "socialist/communist transitional state" but what China really is is a command economy [2]. Chinese people have seen their standard of living change massively in their lifetimes. What do we do? Further concentrate wealth in the hands of the 10,000 richest people because it matters that Jeff Bezos has $210 billion instead of $200 billion.
> If you look back at World War 2, it was in large part caused by communism.
This is hitorically revisionist nonsense. Communism (if you define the USSR as such) saved Europe by defeating Nazi Germany at terrible cost. Stalin tried to warn Britain and France about Hitler and form an anti-Hitler alliance. Britain and France refused.. Japan was imperialist. Germany was imperialist. WW2 started at near the peak of the British Empire. Communism didn't cause the Rape of Nanking or the Holocaust or Japanese internment in the US.
For the rest of it, all I can say is "read a book".
You're making a lot of weak arguments that aren't based in real historical context.
Xi Jinping absolutely believes in Marxism-Leninism. You could argue there were reformers in past decades that held sway, but he doesn't want to see himself get replaced with a reformer.
There has never been a communist state, when we talk about communists we talk about movements that aspire to communism. Maybe the old CCP operated things more like a command economy, but today's China is more like planned mercantilism, which is a weaker regression from "capitalism" which is itself an inaccurate Marxist caricature of how regulated free markets actually work. The CCP leadership are very firmly Marxist-Leninist.
Industrialization amplified power potentials of trade and production, which did leave Japan and Germany operating below their potentials, but communism threatened them both. Look at the first actions Japan took and who made those decisions and what they were concerned about. Look at the first actions the nazis took in Germany, look at who they allied with Japan against, look at the book Hitler wrote about the threat he saw, look at who he labeled and what he did with them.
Russia is the largest country on Earth, by accident? No, because it expands its empire. China is huge, because it's never expanded its empire, it was just born that way? No, it has taken over adjacent regions and expanded its culture. It even tried to expand into Russia, but Russia threatened to nuke them.
Italian fascists and German nazis were a direct reaction to communists psychological imperialism. Marxist global expansion is itself a contradiction, because they hate imperialism, and yet aim to achieve the same goals. Communist International in the USSR was a prime enemy that Japan and Germany allied against. The US got Stalin to dissolve Comintern to try to deflate German and Japanese motivations, but also because the US was very anti-communist. We just saw Germany and Japan as the more immediate threats to the world.
Russia couldn't have beaten Germany without aid being shipped in from the US constantly.
What the US sees right now is the threat of another world war caused by communism.
Personally, looking at the kind of things you write, I think you should step way back, forget everything you've been taught and instead focus on the fundamentals. Go back into history and just understand the basic behaviors of countries, like they are organisms. How trade, industry, economy, military, geography, psychology, culture, communication, transportation, demographics, power imbalances, etc all contribute to the various behaviors and outcomes. Then you can say, ok, there are all of these details, but how many of the details are just....details and not the trend?
The threat that China poses is unmistakable. They have the warped ideology, societal repression, information control, massive state propaganda, most rapid military build-up in history, they have the largest global network of spies in history, they're threatening almost all of their neighbors (not just Taiwan) and so on. The list just keeps going.
If you think the US should simply sit back and watch it unfold without pushing back at all...yeah, we're not that naive.
> Xi Jinping absolutely believes in Marxism-Leninism.
Good. It also doesn't make China Communist, let alone establish that "Communism = bad" as you assert.
> ... which did leave Japan and Germany operating below their potentials, but communism threatened them bot
Are you really saying that Japan and Germany had to do Imperialism and the Holocaust because there was a Communist movement in their countries? Really? That's one of the silliest things I've ever read.
> Italian fascists and German nazis were a direct reaction to communists psychological imperialism.
Fascism is capitalism in crisis. Fascism and imperialism are the ultimate forms of capitalism. "The threat of a more equitable distribution of wealth made us kill millions" is the biggest pro-capitalist cope.
> What the US sees right now is the threat of another world war caused by communism.
Most (if not all) wars since 1945 were instigated by or materially supplied by the US. Saddam Hussein was our puppet until he wasn't. We even looked past him using chemical weapons on Kurds and feigned indignation only when he turned on us. Weird. We them fueled the Iran-Iraq war for 10 years killing more than a million. We then starved the Iraqis for a decade before killing millions more of them in the so-called "War on Terror" when Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 all while ignoring Saudi Arabia who materially supported 9/11. We even covered for the Saudi involvement.
The world would be a demonstrably better place without the US.
> The list just keeps going.
I once heard a quote that the only thing Americans know about is WW2 and they don't know much about that. You're making that point. Repression? You mean like locking up and deporting them for saying "Free Palestine"? Oh wait, that's us.
History will judge the US as the Evil Empire, with or without your DARVO.
You're ignoring things I already stated, such as communism is an aspiration. So of course China is not realized communism, because communism has never been realized at the national scale. The people in charge however, are absolutely communists.
Do you know why Hitler blamed the Jewish people and had them separated out? He blamed the Jewish Bolshevik revolutions in Germany for causing Germany to lose World War 1. Hitler's actual belief was that Bolshevism was a Jewish mechanism to achieve global control. Bolshevism is born out of Marxism and is essentially communist. The "headquarters" of communism was Comintern in Russia. Many of the leaders of the Bolshevist movement in Russia and elsewhere were Jewish. Marxism also comes from Karl Marx, who was Jewish.
This is why he put Jewish people in concentration camps, because he believed with conviction that they were a threat to German sovereignty. This is also why he planned from the very beginning to attack Russia, even while temporarily allying with them. Japan also saw Marxist revolution inside China as a threat to its sovereignty, but it ended up fighting both the communists and the anti-communists.
Obviously many atrocities were committed in these wars. We are lucky that the US saved Russia and China, because they are much weaker adversaries than an expansive Germany or Japan had they conquered their respective regions.
We didn't start World War 1, but we helped finish it. We didn't start World War 2, but we helped finish it. We didn't start the Korean war, the communists did backed by Russia. We didn't start the Vietnam war, but it probably started similarly.
We didn't put Saddam Hussein in power and he was never our puppet, but Iran was a much greater threat than Iraq was and that's why we provided him weapons when he was fighting Iran. Saddam Hussein was afraid of the Islamic revolution and saw it as an existential threat. There were border fights even beforehand. Saudi Arabia also saw the Islamic revolution in Iran as essentially the next Hitler. The reason that war started, was because Iran was trying to export its Islamic Revolution into Iraq, which is the same thing it's been doing again in recent years. Yes, Saddam eventually became a problem for us, but it's more nuanced than you present it.
There are a lot of details around 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan that maybe you aren't aware of, but I don't feel like going into them at present.
Both Marxist movements and Islamic movements have these kinds of extreme radical qualities about them that countries feel the need to defend against. When a country has any sort of power, it gains some capacity to export its way of thinking through investing people, funding and even hardware into that goal.
China is simultaneously threatening to export its ideology in psychological warfare and expand militarily.
I guess you'll never believe any of this, anything else I say or research any of this objectively to decide if it has merit. I can't fix that, that's up to you.
> Do you know why Hitler blamed the Jewish people and had them separated out?
Yes, Hitler did blood libel [1], a tradition continued by Donald Trump [2].
> He blamed the Jewish Bolshevik revolutions in Germany for causing Germany to lose World War 1
Are you arguing Hitler was right? Or that it was a useful tool and a lie? Because you've blamed the Communists for WW2. Multiple times. This makes me think you've been hiding your power level and I'm usually pretty good at spotting that. I should've recognized it from blaming the Communism. It's specifically "cultural Bolshevism" [3]. That too has been recycled today as "cultural Marxism" [4]
> Bolshevism is born out of Marxism and is essentially communist. The "headquarters" of communism was Comintern in Russia. Many of the leaders of the Bolshevist movement in Russia and elsewhere were Jewish. Marxism also comes from Karl Marx, who was Jewish.
I get it now [5].
> We didn't put Saddam Hussein in power and he was never our puppet,
He was our foil against Iran. We gave him weapons to fuel the death count of the Iraq-Iran war. We didn't care when he used nerve gas on the Kurds. All of that is established historical fact.
> I guess you'll never believe any of this
No, I don't buy into neo-Nazi conspiracy theories. You are correct.
Racism was clearly an important aspect of Hitler's motivations and there is an important reason why. The reason racism is important, is because of communism. It would be outrageous to simply discard communism as if it was irrelevant, when these revolutions necessarily inflame these qualities in a society.
Communist revolution was not simply some kind of economic restructuring demand from workers. It is about eradicating religion and revolutionizing culture which in old countries is often tied to the culture of a genetic line of people. That is how inflammatory these Marxist revolutions are, that they bring rise to voices who want to reinvigorate a race and defend religion.
Marxist movements tend to redefine multiple angles of a people's identity. That's why there were also many similarities in Japan's fight against communism and its racial attributes. That's why you also see racial and religious qualities in the US rejection of Marxist tampering in culture today, though they are vastly overstated. Basically information moves so fast now, it's easier for people to see how dumb Marxism is if they weren't indoctrinated young, so plenty of reasonable people reject it without needing religious or racial angles fueling it. Despite that, it still spreads.
I do blame communists for World War 2, in combination with the power imbalances and massive opportunities that industrialization surfaced. Germany and Japan both believed they had larger potential in that environment, but communism gave them the legitimate enemy they needed to justify expanding. Essentially, global communism is about controlling all the resources and leveraging them, so any country that wants to survive outside of communism has to race for resources.
This isn't a neo-Nazi conspiracy theory, it's just history. It's a matter of history that there was an intention to expand communism globally. Look up Comintern if you've never heard of it, which advocated for world communism.
So, you think China is building the largest military in history because of "communism". Do you recognize Chinese people as warriors? Can you remember any pro-war Chinese folklore? Communism is a relatively new flavor in their culture.
And what exactly do you think China can't reproduce in 100 years?
I'm not necessarily saying that, only that it's not an unreasonable concern given the history. Venezuela (a communist country) with Chinese ties, was going to invade Guyana before we captured Maduro. Cambodia, a country with communist remnants and Chinese ties was attacking Thailand. China has a long-standing threat to take Taiwan. It already took Tibet and helped try to take communist control of Korea.
Do you think if you were Japan, South Korea or any of those other countries, you would be sitting comfy on the belief that China has good intentions for them?
So, no, I am not _certain_ that is what China is doing with its military build up. Only that, I see it as a possibility that we can't sleep on.
Your argument about whether Chinese people are pro war isn't as relevant in a country like China as it might be in some democracy, but even in democracies war still occurs even if the population is anti-war. In China, it's just even less relevant, because they have strict social control. You could say the relevance has other angles, like more of the population has to be dedicated to enforcement and repression which takes some of that capacity away from military duties.
China can definitely reproduce a lot of technologies, but if they confirm again that they are a critical threat then there is a lot more we can do to slow their progress if necessary.
>Essentially, global communism is about controlling all the resources and leveraging them, so any country that wants to survive outside of communism has to race for resources.
I hate communism but why faslely single it out, global any group or system will want to control resources as much as possible. You seem extremely stupid to the point of believing nazism was about opposing communism fundamentally rather than antisemitism and racialism.
Again as an avowed capitalist, race is the opposite of good capitalism. I will gladly trade with anyone of any race.
Well, first you'd have to make a decent argument for why it shouldn't be singled out. You're having an immediate rejection of the idea, but why? Have you been configured to feel that?
I'm not arguing that racist motivations and beliefs didn't already exist, but the Bolsheviks were a very real cultural, economic and religious existential threat to German identity which massively amplified the validity and appeal of something like the Nazi party.
Are you arguing that's not true at all? I think that would be ahistorical.
Why would I be configured for anything, its common sense, any large powerful entity will be the same. If you think only communism attempts to control the world why is America playing oil games by invading venezuela?
It may have been a religious threat but that is not an existential threat. What do you think happens if suppose most Germans stopped believing in those fairy tales? Do they combust and die? Capitalism literally has no use for religion and nationalism. They are completely out of scope of capitalism, it is at best neutral about them, and in practice religion and nationalism are a hindrance to practicing free trade.
Of course nazis hated commies just as nazis hated any other alternative source of power, but that was hardly their main animating reason for the genocides. I don't need any "brainwashing" to know what nazis openly and proudly said about Jews and Slavs. Or what are you going to say, Poles were also "commies" which is why Germany attacked them? I think the nazi motivation part of your shtick is so beyond mentally ill it's not even worth bothering with.
Religion and race are absolutely useless gobshite whose only physically observed function is making people kill each other, coming from this throughly capitalist person.
It's funny you say Marxism is something thats hard to imbibe unless indoctrinated from childhood, why did you leave out religion from this, marxism is merely a faulty economic system. Religion is a fundamentally wrong and violently wrong system thst encompasses the entire universe. Religion is precisely what is the first and most fundamental thing that comes to mind ehich absolutely requires brainwashing from childhood to consistently propagate.
Think of it in evolutionary terms. There is physical evolution, but there's also mental evolution, moral evolution, legal evolution and so on.
We also see education as being useful, yet education seems to not teach many critical things which we often leave up to parents. Yet, many parents do not fully teach essential morals or lessons. It wasn't that long ago that the only real kind of formal education was a sort of religious education.
Religion in a way, carries forward crystallized values that people felt were important enough. You can look at all the religions around the world and identify the various elements of how those people behave. Is the way they behave useful, logically?
Not everyone is a scientist or a computer programmer, many people do not invest heavily in their minds. We might think that religion only served a purpose 500+ years ago, because it was an inverted solution to a surveillance state, letting people police themselves from within their own minds when external surveillance apparatus was basically not sufficiently viable.
I would argue some, but not all religions, still offer value as they bring forward crystallized behaviors that serve an actual purpose.
We've all seen how easy it is for people to get manipulated, become violent, etc. That seems to happen even if they aren't religious. So, if the people who are most susceptible to manipulations are pre-manipulated into a positive format that encourages them away from violence, that doesn't sound useless.
It's true that religion has been involved in many wars, but not all of those wars were for religious ends, even if religion was used. If religion wasn't used, it might have been something else. Societal structures and law enforcement have advanced a lot since then.
No, stop trying to pull out of your bs. You said communism is something that can only exist if indoctrinated into in childhood, in a comment where you whined about religions feeling "threatened" while pointedly ignoring the elephant in the room. Just answer me a simple question in a Yes or a No. Does religion survive if it isn't indoctrinated into as a kid?
Why not, if religion wasn't available, we'd wrest one major weapon away from warmongers. They will have to search much harder to galvanize large groups of people to fight for nonsense reasons over. If they didn't have this strong identity ready made on a platter to tap into, things become much harder.
Religion is simply not worth the baggage, it posits and requires faith in the infinitely wrong. Values can be taught without religion, you don't need to be a scientist to have values. Everyone has values including atheists. I see no reason why we can't simply teach values minus religion. I don't see atheists who believe in the American constitution as a good system have by virtue of atheism any less support for it, as an example. For the tiny amount of good you may find religions have provided, on the scale of balance the bloodshed and negativity it has caused are simple far worse and not worth it. And even if you think in terms of some values religions might impart, its also again counterproductive. Almost all religions are very karen and nosy often violently so about lgbtq, so much for the values side of the equation. If a religion might be good for values, such a religion at least hasn't yet emerged.
I'm not the person you're responding to, but there are some counterpoints to your arguments.
China's stockpile of oil is only enough for a few months and that is only assuming that nothing happens to the stockpiles or the ability to access them. China does have a lot of renewable energy infrastructure, but these numbers don't convert directly into oil not being important. Oil is still very important. Their military runs on oil and for many kinds of products oil has no alternative. A lot of their population still uses ICE cars. You can put a percentage on it, like they are 60% less reliant on oil, but these numbers are useless if they still fundamentally rely on it in critically important ways. Which, they do.
Russian oil infrastructure has been under attack, which shows China that their oil imports from Russia are not guaranteed and their own infrastructure can be reached. Being at Venezuela and Iran's doorstep also shows that oil imports from them are not guaranteed.
As far as Iran goes, they can harass, but they can also lose all of their income and imports. While Iran and Russia are being scaled down, more western energy infrastructure can be coming online to replace it over the coming years even if this current situation gets resolved soon. Iran is being boxed in militarily, politically, economically, and more. They can troll, but even their trolling options are being slowly reduced. Their long range missiles can only achieve those ranges by removing the warhead and adding extra fuel. They are incapable of defending the island that most of their income flows through.
Speaking of islands. Xi Jinping absolutely wants to take Taiwan and he's been purging his military just like Stalin did before he invaded Poland and Finland. They've been building out manmade islands and military bases in the sea to increase their claim and threaten anyone who would intervene.
There is also a very big difference between political or token recognition of Taiwan as part of China as a cost of doing business vs real belief. The CCP sees Taiwan as a threat to harmony, because it serves as an example of democracy which China will always be a poor example of. If the CCP falls, Taiwan might be able to serve as a new center of gravity, which was also a credible threat from Hong Kong. That is the flip side of the "One China" policy, where it's only good for them so long as the CCP survives. Even without that, travel and communications between them increases interest in a true democracy that gets compared every time the CCP fails at something. COVID, property investment, unemployment, you name it. Ukraine was a similar issue with Russia, partly because they see Russian language and culture as an encapsulation that their mechanisms of control need to dominate within.
Taiwan is in very close proximity, so even if there is a lot of leverage against China from all angles, if they put everything into it they would probably be able to do it at great cost. They don't have the capability matrix to sufficiently achieve a Venezuela. If they tried that right now, it would just start a new 100 years of humiliation if the clock didn't already start the day Xi Jinping got in.
> China's stockpile of oil is only enough for a few months
China is still getting oil from Iran. Maybe that'll change but there's still (IIRC) >100M barrels of oil in transit to China.
Aside from that, the point isn't to have indefinite supplies. It's to have supplies the last longer than other countries. This is going to create huge problems for the US beofre it creates huge problems for China.
> Russian oil infrastructure has been under attack
This is a delicate balance. Ukraine can only do so much against Russian energy infrastructure before the US and Europe, who supplies the military, reins it in because of the damage done to the global energy market. This included restricting the supply and use of long-range weapons that could be used to strike energy infrastructure deep in Russia.
Like, did you know that some countries (eg Hungary) are still buying oil and gas from Russia [1]?
> As far as Iran goes, they can harass, but they can also lose all of their income and imports
Iran can do more than harass. They're winning. There is no military path to victory for the US and Israel short of the wide-scale use of nuclear weapons.
> ... more western energy infrastructure can be coming online to replace it over the coming years even if this current situation gets resolved soon
This is just wrong. No Western infrastructure can replace 20Mbpd of crude oil production and losing 20-25% of the world's LNG supply. None. You're talking about investment in the trillions of dollars over a decade or two, assuming you can even find raw resources to extract, whihc is far from certain.
> Speaking of islands. Xi Jinping absolutely wants to take Taiwan
Sorry but no. China considers this its territorial waters. And yes I know some of these "islands" (some are just reefs, basically, that they build artificial islands on) are closer to Taiwan or the Phillipines. China considers Taiwan part of its territory so that's no issue for them. Most of the world agrees (ie only ~10 nations recognize Taiwan).
China doesn't want the US or its allies to militarize "islands" right off its coast. Can you blame them?
> The CCP sees Taiwan as a threat to harmony, because it serves as an example of democracy
This is just "they hate us for our freedom" type Ameribrainned propaganda. China does more for its people than the US does. China pulled ~800 million people out of extreme poverty. The truth is that the Chinese government is quite popular with Chinese people. How do Chinese people talk about the US? One good recent example is the "kill line" [2].
Westoids project Western imperialism on China when China has no modern history of doing imperialism. "But Tibet" is the usual rejoinder. That was 1950. Other than that? There was a dispute with Vietnam over like 50 square miles in the late 1970s. And that's it. You want to compare that to the US history with regime change [3]?
Taiwan just isn't the threat to China Westerners make it out to be. We make it out as a threat because it justifies American imperialism. It's the result of propaganda. China believes that the Taiwan question will ultimately be resolved peacefully and there's absolutely no reason to resolve it militarily.
This is a difference of time frames. Every problem we have is immediate requiring a kneejerk reaction. China operates on five year plans but more than that, China plans far mor ein the future than that.
China is only still getting oil from Iran, because we allow it. China knows that. Venezuela and Iran partially tells China, the US does have influence over your oil shipments and you can't sanction proof your oil supply chain. Stopping China's oil shipments right now would just make oil prices go even higher, but we definitely could stop them.
As for Russia, yes there is still some European reliance on Russian oil/gas, but that isn't the only issue as there can also be concern over civilian casualties inside Russia with a complete collapse of oil infrastructure which could hurt some aspects of public support for Ukraine inside Russia and in the rest of the world.
Iran doesn't produce anywhere near 20 million barrels of oil per day, and only a tiny fraction of the 30% of LNG supply is disrupted, which will be coming back online within 3 years. You could argue that Iran might expand its attacks on all the infrastructure in the region to try to take more production offline, but their capacity to do that is shrinking every single day. Even if they did manage it, that would basically greenlight a multi-national ground invasion to end their regime for all time. So just like your arguments about the limitations Ukraine faces in taking out Russian infrastructure, even though Iran is a terrorist state and demonstrating how their terrorism operates, they are still fundamentally limited in what they can do without destroying themselves.
When it comes to China and Taiwan, you need to better appreciate that China has had a standing policy to take Taiwan by force if Taiwan sees itself as independent. Increasingly the Taiwanese population do see themselves as independent and they are arming themselves for defense.
China did not magically bring its population out of poverty, the US did that, by opening up to them and allowing them into the WTC (which they then abused). We thought it might liberalize their economy, which might liberalize their politics, which would pave the way for democratic reform. It didn't happen, but that was part of the plan. The other part of the plan was to increase the dependency of China on western supply chains, because this was part of the logic to stop world wars by making everyone interdependent on each other.
Communism is freaking awful, because it is never achieved and always seems to stagnate into a permanent state of dictatorship. It then sucks enough that it cannot maintain itself naturally, so it has to repress its population and heavily control information to simply prevent crumbling. The logic is not self-reinforcing. Therefore, it absolutely, critically is a threat to freedom around the world.
Technology advancement and resource access accelerates with global trade, so if one country goes rogue, that supply chain can be cut off reducing their incentive for war. China now sees that it continues to have many critical dependencies and its current potential is only achieved as part of a global trade network. Their sanction proofing will never be complete. The concern is that they may not care that they're at a disadvantage and do what they want anyway.
I believe social media is on a collision course with an iceberg called Section 230.
Broadly speaking, Section 230 differentiates between publishers and platforms. A platform is like Geocities (back in the day) where the platform provider isn't liable for the content as long as they staisfy certain requirements about havaing processes for taking down content when required. A bit like the Cox decision today, you're broadly not responsible for the actions of people using your service unless your service is explicitly designed for such things.
A publisher (in the Section 230 sense) is like any media outlet. The publisher is liable for their content but they can say what they want, basically. It's why publishers tend to have strict processes around not making defamatory or false statements, etc.
I believe that any site that uses an algorithmic news feed is, legally speaking, a publisher acting like a platform.
Example: let's just say that you, as Twitter, FB, IG or Youtube were suddenly pro-Russian in the Ukraine conflict. You change your algorithm to surface and distribute pro-Russian content and suppress pro-Ukraine content. Or you're pro-Ukrainian and you do the reverse.
How is this different from being a publisher? IMHO it isn't. You've designed your algorithm knowingly to produce a certain result.
I believe that all these platforms will end up being treated like publishers for this reason.
So, with today's ruling about platforms creating addiction, (IMHO) it's no different to surfacing content. You are choosing content to produce a certain outcome. Intentionally getting someone addicted is funtionally no different to changing their views on something.
I actually blame Google for all this because they very successfully sold the idea that "the algorithm" ranks search results like it's some neutral black box but every behavior by an algorithm represents a choice made by humans who created that algorithm.
This is an opinion and I believe it's wrong. And you just have to look at the statute to see why [1]:
> (c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
> (2) Civil liability
> (A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
"in good faith" is key here. Here's another opinion [2]:
> One argument advanced by those who want to limit immunity for platforms is that these algorithms are a form of content creation, and should therefore be outside the scope of Section 230 immunity. Under this theory, social media companies could potentially be held liable for harmful consequences related to content otherwise created by a third party.
So far the Supreme Court has sidestepped this issue despite cases making it to the Appeals Court. Until the Supreme Court addresses, none of us can say with any certainty what is and isn't protected.
I don't expect that to work, but who knows. Editors "rank", curate, select, present, etc content to people, and have for a long time, and it's always understood to be speech.
Remember, according to that link, 230 does not give platforms any new rights. It simply makes it easier for them to end cases faster and cheaper, that they would have already won on 1st amendment grounds.
Neither you nor I can say definitively what the law is until it's been testedin court and really until the Supreme Court weighs in and that just hasn't happened yet. At least I'm saying "this is my opinion (and, as an aside, I'm not alone in that opinion as I've pointed out). Condescendingly posting a "here's why you're wrong" link doesn't make you smart. Or informed. Or correct. Just confidently wrong.
Even in this post you contradict yourself. If S230 doesn't grant more rights, why does it matter? If it makes it easier, then it's giving you something, just like anti-SLAPP statutes give you something (and matter).
Also, this isn't a First Amendment issue. Nobody is questioning whether a platform can publish their own content or somebody else's. The issue is liability for what it is expressed. Publishing your own content comes under a strict liability [1] standard. Section 230 establishes that publishing third-party content does not, which again contradicts the point that that "230 does not give platforms any new rights".
Wouldn't you agree there's a difference between being able to post defamatory or false statements with or without liability?
> (c) (c)Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
> (1) Treatment of publisher or speaker
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
This is a protection for being a platform for third-party (including user-generated) content.
Some more discussion on this distinction [2]:
> Section 230’s legal protections were created to encourage the innovation of the internet by preventing an influx of lawsuits for user content.
It goes on to talk about publishers, distributors and Internet Service Providers, the last of which I characterize as "platforms".
By the way, my view here isn't a fringe view [3]:
> One argument advanced by those who want to limit immunity for platforms is that these algorithms are a form of content creation, and should therefore be outside the scope of Section 230 immunity. Under this theory, social media companies could potentially be held liable for harmful consequences related to content otherwise created by a third party.
This isn't good reasoning. According to your analysis, any website, ISP, or hosting provider that uses a firewall or Cloudflare is by definition a publisher, since they algorithmically shape traffic to prohibit suspicious IP addresses from accessing content.
Not at all. Intenet matters. Is Cloudfare trying to shape user behavior or push a particular position or content? No.
Just look at the Cox decision from the Supreme Court today. As long as the (Internet) service isn't designed for or sold as a method of downloading copyrighted material, the provider isn't responsible for any actions by its users. In other words, intent matters.
I find that technical people really get stuck on this aspect of the law. They look for technical compliance or an absolute proof standard because we're used to doing things like proving something works mathematically. But the law is subjective and holistic. It looks at the totality of evidence and applies a subjective test.
And intent here is fairly easy to establish. We could take an issue like Russia and look at all the posts and submissions and see how many views and interactions those posts got. We then divide them into pro-Russian and pro-Ukraine and establish a clear bias. We also look at any modifications made to the algorithm to achieve those goals.
People hate Ticketmaster. For good reason. TM throws on all these fees, clearly engages in third-party selling, makings buying difficult and jacks up prices. All of this is known. But what's less known is that artists, especially big artists, like Ticketmaster. Why? Because TM is a sacrificial anode. It takes all the hate but adding junk fees that in part go to the artist. The artist can say they're selling seats from as low as $20 in press releases while the least they will get for a seat is $30 because of all the fees.
Being hated is a service you can sell because it takes away attention from what you're doing. You get to blame this third-party but you're still absolutely complicit in everything they're doing. You see where this is going?
Israel is America's Ticketmaster. Anything bad that Israel or an Israeli firm does, the US could end today with a phone call by simply saying "we're cutting off aid if you don't stop doing". The price of this is to be the sacrificial anode for what is actually American foreign policy. There are well-funded and organized efforts to whitewash Israel's reputation and those were successful up until the last few years.
Israel is a huge supplier of spyware eg Pegasus [1]. Despotic regimes use this to spy on journalists and opposition figures and has likely been used to locate and kill them. You think we couldn't stop that? Of course we can. But we like that because, again, Israel takes the heat.
So Israel interfering in Slovenia's elections is the least surprising thing I've heard. I'd be surprised if it wasn't true. You will find Israeli influence in probably every election.
I agree with everything you said except that the US is able to stop it. Think about it: Wouldn't Israel simply use these same tools in the US to install a puppet president they can easily manipulate?
there was some talk some weeks ago about some emails being released that implicated a lot of politicians and business leaders...but I can't really remember so much has happened since then!
Your broader point is true but the characterization of Israel as an extension of America is not.
Israel is happy to be the sacrificial anode for more or less anyone willing to pay and not immediately counter to Israel's own geopolitical interests. This is a service they offer to the world, not just America.
America simply happens to be the largest customer among many.
Yeah, I’ve come to the same realization. Israel does the dirty work for the US and they take all the heat. If the U.S. really wanted Israel to stop, all they need to do is take out special privileges Israel gets and put down economic sanctions.
But could they? You are somehow assuming that all this "dirty work" as you call it is only done on behalf of others and not used to ensure continued ("unwavering") support for themselves.
All of this might be true if Israel didn't have undue influence over the American officials who are authorized to pick up that phone. But they do, and so the phone doesn't get picked up.
Also, if your parable about Ticketmaster were true. But it isn't. Most artists do indeed dislike them; the paltry kickback isn't worth the... bad blood... it sends their way. And it's weird that your read is that most artists secretly hold their fans in contempt. I don't know what kind of person just assumes that of others, except that they're that way themselves, maybe.
So I know you're making a joke/statement about how the post-9/11 volunteers got royally screwed over and are (understandably) disillusioned with war but I just wanted to add something here.
This change increases maximum enlistment age. Maximum reenlistment age is something else entirely. To reenlist, you need to be able to complete 20 years of service by age 62. So if you joined at 18 and did 8 years then you can technically rennlist up to age 50. Not that you would or should but you can.
The military has spent decades working on a general aptitude test, called the ASVAB [1]. It's a score up to 99, which is usually what people focus on, but there are also line scores for things like electrical and mechanical. When you join, there'll be a score range you'll need to be in and possibly certain subtest scores.
Generally speaking, you've needed a minimum ASVAB of 31 to join the military. Recruiting stations will have quotas of only accepting so many below 50 so if you're below 50 you may have a more restrictive choice of job, even though you qualify, because you're an undesirable candidate. You take up a valuable sub-50 slot. Oh and below 50 and the Air Force won't even sneeze on you. They don't have to take you. They have more than enough applicants.
This can go the other way too. You can score too high for certain jobs such that they won't want to sign you up because you'll get bored. This is way less common obviously.
Every area of the country is covered by a recruiting station ("RS") for each branch and is staffed by recruiters who usually aren't volunteers (eg most marines on a re-enlistment after an initial 4 years will have to do a Special Duty Assignment--SDA--and will end up as a recruiter or a drill instructor). Each recruiter will generally have a quota to fill of 2 contracts per month.
In some areas (eg Texas) this is no problem at all. Recruiters can be picky. In others, it's way more of a challenge. Anyway, a few years ago the enlistment numbers for the Navy must've gotten so bad that for awhile they were accepting an ASVAB of 10 [1]. 10 is bordering on illiterate.
I say this because raising the maximum enlistment age to 42 is almost as desperate as lowering the ASVAB minimum to 10. I cannot imagine a 42 year old E-! in basic getting yelled at by a 23 year old DI. You won't be doing 20 for the pension. I guess you'll get the GI Bill after 3-4 years. That's something I guess? Most other 42 year olds you'll meet will be near or beyond their 20 years.
In 2004, as a senior in high school, I tried enlisting in the Marines (infantry, what was I thinking based on the year). I scored 99 on the ASVAB (finished way earlier than everyone else) with a high SAT score as well.
Passed all the physicals at Fort Dix. I was rejected.
Soon after an Army recruiter called me and said they are willing to take me.
Someone told me I was rejected because of high test scores. I didn't really believe them, but it kind of makes sense.
> Someone told me I was rejected because of high test scores. I didn't really believe them, but it kind of makes sense.
Armed forces does a lot of tracking and they need a mix of people. It makes sense to try to get people into jobs that work for both the person and the seevice, and where the person is likely to stay (if the service wants you to). Marine infantry is an important and prestigious job, but it might not be something that would have kept your interest.
The raising of the recruitment age has nothing to with "desperation" (recruitment has been at a high) and everything to do with people living longer/healthier lives and the military has been handing out age waivers for years.
The max enlistment age has been de facto 42ish for a while, they're just getting rid of pointless paper work and obstacles that don't make sense.
This war of choice is going to redefine the US's policy and relationships with Middle East, China, Russia and Europe for the rest of the century. Even if it ends tomorrow. Mainly because the only way it ends tomorrow is if sanctions on Iran are lifted. And they should be lifted anyway so I'd be a fan of that.
China, Iran and Russia look to the the big winners here. Everyone else is a loser, the US the biggest loser of them all. In history books I think this will go down as the biggest geopolitical miscalculation and mistake in US history of anything to date and it's not even close.
The Middle East consists of a bunch of US client states where arms are used to maintain fealty. The US gives arms to a despotic regime who enrich themselves off of their country's natural resources and they use those arms to stay in power.
This last month has shown the US security guarantee to the Gulf to be a paper tiger. This is a seismic potential rift between the US and Israel. This war of choice has undermined relationship with long-term allies (eg in Europe) who were never consulted and never approved of this war and may suffer with significantly higher electricity prices as a result.
This is a Napoleon invading Russia level of blunder.
As weird as this sounds, militarily and strategically, Iraq was a relative "success". I mean not to the thousands or millions harmed or killed by US actions and all the damage done along the way, but Iraq now does a US-friendly regime and it exports oil to the US and a bunch of allies. Should we have done it? No. Was it worth the price? No. But was it a complete failure? Also, no.
Unlike Iraq, there's no way to invade Iran. it's surrounded by mountains on 3 sides and ocean on the third. It's a country is ~93 million people with a regime and a military specifically designed to resist US bombardment and interference. The chokehold it has on the Strait of Hormuz is currently being demonstrated. And there's nothing the US can do about that.
If the leaked terms of the 15 point plan are true (and that's a big IF) and any end to hostilities looks remotely like that, Iran is going to end up in a substantially better position than they had under the JCPOA and sanctions will also likely end. That's now the price of peace.
And in doing that the US has worsened and likely will redefine its relationship to every country from Spain to Japan.
1. Send Marines to seize Kharg island via long range air assault from 2 ARGs + land bases
2. Flood Kharg-adjacent mainland with tactical aviation to eliminate short range artillery and rocket systems
3. Fortify position on Kharg island and declare all oil revenue will be placed in US-controlled holding account, with release to Iran contingent on cooperation (re: Why occupy Kharg? Because then you have actual money in an account as leverage, while calming international oil prices and consumers, not just a blockade, which antagonizes international oil consumers)
4. Declare a buffer demilitarized zone around the Strait of Hormuz
5. Land Marines in buffer zone if necessary to monitor
~50% of the revenue to pay the Iranian military comes from oil exports. Therefore, the Iranian regime doesn't survive without oil export revenue. 90% of Iranian oil is exported through Kharg.
It's an aggressive plan, but it's feasible.
Especially because Iran has no ability to repel an invasion of the island or retake it once it's occupied.
Their only possible reaction would be to bombard troops there, destroying their own export infrastructure in the process.
Which would depend on how close to the mat the current regime wants to take this, as that would also seal their eventual downfall.
"Their only possible reaction would be to bombard troops there, destroying their own export infrastructure in the process."
Right, so if that's their only possible reaction, isn't that a bad thing for everyone? It looks like they've made it clear they're not going down without bringing everyone else with them, and why would they? What options do they have?
I mean they seem to have made it clear by their actions. They're in an existential situation, so its not like there is any reason to hold anything back.
If your opponent is trying to turn you into Libya, then whatever you do just has to not fail as badly as that for it to be the right move. You basically become a cornered animal.
The thing about disintegrating regimes is there is no "they".
There's people with power, looking out for their own self interests. You think after a few more weeks all of the newly promoted Iranian military leadership is going to weigh a few million dollars in personal benefit against the glory of the cause and decide on the latter?
OK, so take this back to your boots on kharg island plan, where this "no they" only has the option of bombarding our troops. Are you saying they also have the option of ... Getting a few million dollars in personal benefit somehow?
The only option they have on offer is death, either fighting the us and Israel, or fighting in whatever civil war crops up after. Why would they believe in any negotiations after the last two times?
> The only option they have on offer is death, either fighting the us and Israel, or fighting in whatever civil war crops up after. Why would they believe in any negotiations after the last two times?
The writing is on the wall that the US wants to end the war (and Israel won't have a choice but to follow). Which means anyone with military command authority in Iran has leverage to extract concessions from the US.
Do either of us think the current US admin is above causing a few million to appear in a bank account somewhere, in exchange for secret cooperation?
Especially when the calculus is between stick (Israeli assassination) and carrot (money), and that substantial personal wealth means power in any post-war Iranian order. Or living as a wealthy expat as plan B.
The point of regime decapitation, to give the Israeli assassinations (especially of internal security force leaders) their most strategically foresighted interpretation (instead of the more likely opportunistic one), is to shuffle people into power that haven't already made a resist vs cooperate decision.
At some point, everyone cares about their own skin and their future most.
> Do either of us think the current US admin is above causing a few million to appear in a bank account somewhere, in exchange for secret cooperation?
> Especially when the calculus is between stick (Israeli assassination) and carrot (money), and that substantial personal wealth means power in any post-war Iranian order. Or living as a wealthy expat as plan B.
No, of course we wouldn't (and I'd say shouldn't) be above that. The question is how that comes to pass.
Imagine you're some sort of Iranian official that actually has some sway in the country.
1) why on earth would you even entertain negotiations, when your enemy repeatedly uses them as cover for sneak attacks?
2) assuming you get past 1), and the us offers you money. If you take it and leave, you don't have any influence in your country anymore anyway, so what have we gained? If you take it and stay, do the people still follow you if you capitulate? And what's to stop Israel from assassinating you anyway, or launching another war 6 months from now?
The only rational move seems to be to establish deterrence by making this thing as painful as possible for everyone involved, and us invading plays right into that.
there is no way the USMC would be able to hold Kharg and the buffer zone without extensive casualties. the buffer zone would be a full-fledged combat zone, non-stop. you'd see Ukraine-at-its-worst levels of drone strikes, and the US military is not equipped to deal with that, not yet.
the Iranian missile stockpile may be drained thin, but their army and conventional equipment surpluses could absolutely maintain a consistent and aggressive pushback.
> Their only possible reaction would be to bombard troops there, destroying their own export infrastructure in the process.
it's already destroyed mate. and keeping it up and running would be a tall order when the Iranians are right there.
> ~50% of the revenue to pay the Iranian military comes from oil exports.
this is a country that convinced children to charge through minefields during Iran-Iraq; you think pay is going to stop them? or that China and Russia wouldn't give them ample weapons?
> could absolutely maintain a consistent and aggressive pushback
With 30+ km systems launchedu from flat terrain, right onshore of US air power? That's the limit of 155mm conventional, and Iran isn't launching gold-plated Excalibur rounds.
That means rocket artillery, either in unguided mode (see next point) or SRBM (of which they don't have an unlimited supply).
Enabling drone strikes at 30+ km over water against US EW looks very different than terrestrial Ukraine too.
> it's already destroyed mate
Citation-needed that the oil infrastructure on Kharg was destroyed.
> this is a country that convinced children to charge through minefields during Iran-Iraq
I expect the zeal of modern Iranian youth for the revolution is dimmed from 1980.
I don’t disagree with any of your assessments, but I don’t know if it’s a bigger mistake than Iraq…yet. That war was a 10 year (longer if you bc point ISIS) debacle that cost trillions.
Let’s wait a few years before saying this mistake is bigger first.
However, one point that I agree with that might lead to this war being worse: the Gulf are showing some serious buyers remorse with sticking in the US orbit. Both the uselessness of America’s strategy and the almost clear prejudice Trump shows towards the Arabs vs Israel in the decision tree of this conflict is unsettling for the Gulf states.
Winning for Iran, their whole strategy, is that their pressure on the straight hurts the US and world economy to a devastating level.
What the US is gearing up for right now is a multiyear war where the US military goes into the island tunnels and tries to hold the Straight open by force.
The impact of the Strait of Hormuz being closed goes well beyond oil. Here are a few off the top of my head:
- Qatar produces 20-33% of the world's helium;
- The supply chain for ~30 of the world's fertilizer relies upon supply chains going through the Strait of Hormuz. How do you feel about 10-20% food inflation?
- ~20% of the world's LNG passes through the STrait. Let's see how that bites come (NOrthern Hemisphere) winter;
- Many Asian countries are wholly reliant on Gulf oil for electricity and fuel; and
- Roughly ~20% of California's oil comes from Iraq. The US is the world's largest single oil and gas producer but that doesn't really matter when California has blocked any pipelines into the state such that ~75% of their oil arrives by ship.
Oil demand to a point is fairly inelastic but once you get beyond about $120-130 you start getting into destructive demand. Fuel prices really spike and in many places, it's going to severely disrupt electricity.
There are many fuel usages for which we have no alternative, namely shipping and aviation. Oh and a lot of heavy machinery and industrial uses of diesel.
Additionally, there are significant (at least 25% of the total) non-energy uses. Construction, plastic, roads, etc.
Weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels is a decades-long project and only China really is trying to do that. I suspect only China has the long-term supply chains, willpower and commitment to pull off that kind of national project.
The main thing that worries me about the use of fossil fuels is the heavy machinery where said heavy machinery is used for farming food.
There are service stations in rural Victoria that have run out of petrol[0]. If farmers can't run their machines, I don't want to continue that train of thought. I would hope that governments would obviously prioritise food production and distribution over, kinda everything else, but logic and government seem to have a strange relationship.
What is also true is that media has been saying both:
- Don't panic buy, we've got plenty
- We'll start running out in mid-April.
So, unlike TP during COVID, which can be manufactured locally, there is a dark cloud on the horizon and precious little to encourage any optimism regarding the Strait of Hormuz.
I now sign up for 1-2 months a year to catch up on shows I like and just rotate which streaming services I have. Yes, this is anecdotal.
It's hard to find data on how common rotating streaming services is. I would guess not common. I found this from 2021 showing the number of streaming services the average US household has [1]. It's worth noting that this was based on lockdown-era data.
The number if still quite high. I still have 3-4 mainly because my ISP gives me 1 and Amazon Prime bundles it. Were it not for those, I'd probably stick with 2. This is imperfect data because is it the same 4 or are some or all of these rotated? We just don't know.
Most of the data around this is how streaming is cannibalizing satellite and cable. But at this rate Netflix will cost $30+ in 10-15 years. Will it still have growing revenue and the same subscriber numbers? There is price elasticity here.
[1]: https://www.thewrap.com/u-s-households-with-4-streaming-serv...
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