blackbagboys

11 ms·

61.
by blackbagboys 9y ago
If you're going to play that game, you can very easily make a case (and probably a much stronger one) that capitalism's body-count is much, much higher. For starters, you'd have to credit it with the extermination of the Nati
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
His primary skill is being adept at Internet marketing. His other keys to success are inheriting a successful family business and gambling on Facebook. Some variation of this story accounts for about 95% of "personality entrepreneurs&q
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
I appreciate the irony of assuming that the writing style of an article about how data-obsessive engineering cultures strip away the capacity for creative thought and engagement must have been determined by profit-maximizing analytics, espe
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
The Peasant Fasci had nothing to do with the Italian fascist government and had been suppressed decades before it came to power. The Peasant Fasci were left-wing and socialist and their support base later supplied fighters to the anti-fasci
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
The only thing that guarantees you protection from the ire of the U.S. federal government is possession of at least one thermonuclear weapon. The goal for these corporate vehicles is to shield oneself from civil lawsuits, not the wrath of t
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
There are few modern white collar spectacles more nauseating than watching capitalist overlords jerk themselves off over their wise decision to make lifestyle choices literally everyone else would also choose if they weren't forcibly r
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
Well, he also killed millions of people, so a little whoring probably didn't weigh too heavily on his conscience.
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
I'm sure a lot of them are pissed at her, but that's the point. Being part of the ruling class means that if they're pissed at you, you get exiled to the fringe of the ruling class and have to live in the outer darkness of me
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
This is in fact not an irresolvable metaphysical dispute but an introductory undergraduate economics problem, and the answer is that it depends on the elasticity of the market.
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
Shkreli operated as, essentially, a lone wolf on the margins of the financial world. Holmes is completely enmeshed in the ruling political-financial-military nexus.
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
A more prosaic and more likely explanation is that states controlled by the Republican party seek to suppress black voting by any means possible because it's a threat to their hold on power.
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
"He" figured this out, or some of the hundreds of engineers and scientists employed by him in an entirely separate enterprise figured it out?
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
Cutting spending and raising taxes are not both indistinguishable forms of “austerity”. In the U.S. political context, the former almost always means cutting essential services to the most precarious people in society and the burden of the
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
Please tell me more about these illuminati thinkers and their strain of thought
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
All effective political organizing appeals at some level to emotions. Appeals to pure reason is the domain of dusty technocrats who are content to fiddle with the knobs on a fundamentally unjust system.
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
Appealing to people’s sense of outrage is perfectly justifiable if the outragenousness is rooted in facts.
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
Actually, we need to do is organize politically and demand that our political leaders use the vast resources at our disposal to build a society that takes care of everyone’s essential needs for free, rather than allowing them to be hoarded
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
That's great that he gets to spend the massive amounts of wealth he's accumulated through monopolistic business practices, ruthlessly exploiting his labor force (or his "contractors" labor force) and avoiding taxes on hi
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
This is actually a return to a common urban housing pattern that disappeared with the middle-class exodus from urban centers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy#History
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
Just as a historical aside, I think this anecdote comes from the February revolution (which overthrew the czar, and which the book also covers), not the Bolshevik October revolution (which overthrew the parliamentary government established
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
The Australian gambler you're thinking of is most likely David Walsh, who made many millions by deploying similar systems in horse races across South East Asia; he is also noted as a collector of eccentric art. https://en.wi
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
That's $1.8b for the Software Engineering Institute, which does a lot of federal contracting work.
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
The obvious answer is that if an industry or company is a monopolistic or oligopolistic rent-seeker, then it should be nationalized or converted to a public utility.
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
This is reactionary nonsense. In no sense is any culturally transmitted system of metaphysics "inherently part of you", any more than driving on the right- or left-hand side of the road is "inherently part of you".
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
The "1%" might be an overly broad bracket (it's catchier than "the parasite rentier class"), but there are plenty of people in that category who actively support policies that not only don't benefit the vast ma
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
I'm not sure whether gnarbarian is trolling or just operating outside his range of understanding, but those with an honest interest in the subject will find that Marxist-inflected schools of thought of course comprise many diverse and
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
Marxism and Stalinism are different things.
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
This is true, but those people enjoy their wealth only at the sufferance of the party oligarchy; they take their marching orders on any political issue from the party and if they ever challenged the party oligarchy on any issue their wealth
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
Yes, there are still white supremacists who are angry about non-white people being allowed to live in the country and treated as equal citizens, that is also accurate.
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by blackbagboys 9y ago
It was a system of quotas based on national origin, explicitly designed to maintain the "ethnic character" of the country, and either de jure or de facto banned Asian and African immigration.

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