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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • Patents are not, at their core, a good thing. They are nice for an idealized and transient scenario, but the reality of capitalism is that the vast, vast majority of investment, production, etc. are done by a handful of large companies, and that includes R&D. Patents are, in reality, overwhelmingly one of the many tools large corporations have to shut out upstarts. In short, it entrenches the power of monopolies, trusts, and similar large businesses.

    And that’s without even starting on how the law can be abused and, with the way our legal systems work, it is fundamentally more abusable for the side that has more money and can afford top corporate lawyers to concoct convenient arguments, leaving little Jimmy in the dust.






  • Not the person you’re responding to

    Obviously Israel shouldn’t exist at all. It’s not a diplomatically expedient thing to say, but it’s the only real anti-colonialist answer because Israel is actively a colony. That doesn’t mean expelling all the Jews from Palestine – it might shock you to know there are non-Israeli Jews currently in Palestine – but it does mean that the proper boarders for Palestine are restored and thus that there is no ethnostate (Jewish or otherwise). Recent additions to the Israeli colony (for they are always recruiting) can be sent back to their homelands. Many of them have been there long enough that they have no connection to those homelands anymore (including the more direct descendants of Holocaust survivors, etc.) and they can stay on the land that was Israel, but a lot of them are only there because they like the Jewish ethnostate thing and will therefore flee of their own will. That volume of people fleeing will probably incite still more to flee, but some will remain and they should be treated humanely and as equal citizens, prosecuting whatever crimes they committed but not being treated like subhumans the way that Israelis treated Palestinian prisoners.

    The US is a much more difficult question because unlike Israelis being a minority compared to Palestinians, there are many more Euro-Americans, etc than there are Native Americans because the genocidal project of the US is much more complete. Inevitably some land, the land recently taken and some of the more useful land than what the Natives have been left with, should be returned to them, but obviously deporting all the Euros, etc. is neither viable nor productive, like how (to a much, much smaller extent) deporting all the Israelis is neither viable nor productive.

    That said, separate from demographics and land rights, the US government absolutely shouldn’t exist because it is terrorizing the world, including through proxies like Israel.


  • If you were following burden of proof, you could stake your claim on particular billionaires who you say never exploited anyone, and it would then be on the other fellow to prove they did exploit people. Without example billionaires, however, your claim is nebulous and no one has any particular reason to believe in it.



  • Capitalism has been struggling with the problem of collapse, and in fact it did from pretty early on in that history you mention, with Italy, Germany, Japan, Spain, and so on. The problem isn’t just going to go away, because a system that needs infinite expansion in a finite world necessarily will collapse. It can sometimes “innovate” its way into having more time, and modern imperialism is just such an example of that innovation, pushing much of the poverty capitalism demands into the third world, but that just changes the specific circumstances of the problem rather than eliminating it. The US as we speak is continuously losing its grip on its hegemony as the imperial periphery and semi-periphery develop sovereignty. History will not end.




  • Yeah, that part is bizarre

    The police said on Sunday that a knife had been recovered and posted a picture on social media. The next day, however, it posted another message saying the knife had been taken from the crime scene by an unidentified man.

    Officers recovered a different knife from the scene, thinking it was the one that the suspect had been carrying, according to the Gothamist.

    An NYPD spokesman told the news website that the knife they picked up must have been left behind by another subway rider.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93y74xl1wvo

    So they just accidentally recovered some unrelated knife, thinking it was the suspect’s knife, while failing to recover his actual knife that he charged them with. I don’t know what the truth is, but that story is genuinely ridiculous.








  • Which West Germany didn’t face?

    We already established they had a Nazi problem

    the latter is more of that “librul witchcraft” of globalization.

    Again, the poverty in the region was longstanding and persists even today.

    the Soviets brutalized the East, and that left a legacy of uneducated poverty.

    I’m not impressed with your link, remember that the West had the RAF, which enjoyed a fair deal of popular support. I’d also need a source on things like poor education since socialist states historically are the most consistently excellent at things like mass literacy (though of course modern Germany is fine in that regard).

    So it’s reduced to “They were poor” which was always the case and is still the case, though at least there was virtually no homelessness in the East, which the West and notably modern Germany cannot say.

    Oh, and you’re right there were no camps in East Germany, those camps were in the USSR

    I said death camps, which the USSR also didn’t have. Labor camps are just a form of prison labor that people use the Holocaust’s work-to-death camps to sound more brutal than they are. Prison labor was also practiced in West Germany, is practiced in modern Germany, and is practiced in whatever liberal state you like. The equivocation here is really the peak of the “Soviets were also Nazis” bullshit that is of course popular with the aggrieved German liberals and anticommunist historians the world over.

    Well no, there’s one step further, but I hope we can avoid talking about it because it doesn’t concern Germany.