There are a lot of reasons for the downfall of the #USA but a big one is the purchase of traditional #media by plutocrat goons
Look at this fucking shit:
EDIT: some people are angry that i am potentially misleading because this isn't a recent headline. i am trying to make a point about the decay of traditional media and our current state of things. but yes, this is is from 2014, after #bezos bought WaPo. my point still stands, and you should follow my account for commentary, not breaking news
The Washington Post Is Hitler's toilet paper.
America dies in Bezos Darkness.
.
@invadersil But wouldn't it be perfectly in line with the Madman Theory for the proprietor of Pravda Social to resolve a falling-out with Darth Melon and with the ghosts of ajatollahs past alike by offering Xitter to Iran as a war reparation?
Bezos is a lying fascist, episode 276,305,418.
@jamesmarshall @benroyce I don't blame you for not wanting to go to their site. Here's an archive.ph link: https://archive.ph/Uiu60
The author apparently is one Ian Morris claiming to be a professor at Stanford (I don't even have to look up this person's history to learn they were born into privilege do I?)
Interestingly this was written back in 2014 apparently. They were also running hit pieces against Obama. 🙄 I didn't realize they were this bad even that long ago.
@jaypeach53
Katherine Graham in '71 wasn't aligned with anything but taking a business risk that would have astronomical payoff. Up until Reagan's FCC abolished the Fairness Doctrine in '87, news agencies were all over the map, but always focused on at least breaking even. It's not an endeavor that makes bank... without donors. Donors, then, however weren't primarily or exclusively investors.
About 1986 is, IMO, when things tanked. Rush Limbaugh.
@benroyce The "us" in the headline is billionaires.
What a load of horseshit!
@benroyce No one wants to click. I don't blame any of you. Here is an archive.ph link: https://archive.ph/Uiu60
Apparently it was written by Ian Morris who claimed to be a professor at Stanford back in 2014. Also, apparently Obama is an illegal president. Or so it says.
Democracy dies in darkness alright — and they were at the forefront of trying to spread that darkness even back then.
Unrelated to the main topic but it's worth mentioning that archive.today have been doing some shady shit. I'd steer clear of them if for no other reason than to not risk being part of the botnet. Wikipedia recently banned them as a source because of that and them manipulating their archive.
@boo_ @benroyce I don't particularly trust or like them, but what the heck else can I use?
No archive.org doesn't work the same. It seems to be pickier about saving pages (well, an older one like that might be in there, but often new stuff isn't. And there seem to be a lot of limits on getting them to actually archive something at will.) Sometimes one just wants a quick little snapshot of some dumb news article that isn't worth truly saving.
This one doesn't *deserve* archive.org really...
Yeah, I don't think there really is an alternative yet, but I just thought it'd be worth mentioning so people know the potential risks given the history of the site and are able to make informed decisions about whether to use it. The DDOS thing is not something you'd know unless you read about it or checked your browser console, for example.
@boo_ @benroyce Well, I think a lot of us heard about Wikipedia banning them. That was kind of big.
I'm mostly using them for crapsites like Washington Post that deserve to see as few accesses as possible (and better still, for those to be to something like that instead of to an actual user.) Actually... if they wanted to DDoS washington post I think I might just look the other way... 🤫
(Like even if they serve Russia, frankly WP serves Russia too...)
I'm not arguing against archiving the wp link at all and I just heard about the ban from Wikipedia yesterday, but you're right that it did happen a while ago.
But the DDoSing allegations are not of excessive scraping, rather the site embedded malicious JS in the archived pages they served which DDoSed a third site unrelated to the one archived.
there's a lot of people angry about this is the comments. i'm thinking of editing it, but at the same time i'm somewhat unimpressed with the idea that i'm misleading anyone. it's a real headline
i edited it
"I'm still amazed at how quickly Trump and Putin transformed the once proud and noble Party of Lincoln into just another simple rabble of seditious and treasonous playground bullies.
I'm not kidding, it really is startling and amazing. I mean my goodness, it only took two or three years."
SearingTruth
@benroyce Hey, he's got a point. Wars are the one reliable reason to extract and recirculate wealth hoarded by sillionaires that they're relatively powerless to lobby against, and this recirculation of stagnant wealth can, indeed, make everybody richer.
Of course, we could be even safer and richer if we recirculated the stagnant money without having any wars.
@huopa Ever heard of banks?
These are devices that can lend out wealth that does not yet exist so that something new could be created without having to hoard stagnant money first.
A sneaky problem is, since these are necessarily time-travelling things, when the society takes a shape that, say, prevents vertical economical mobility, then banks will, on the premise that currently poor people will not have any money in the future, stop lending to poor people the future money that these people have in the future where they can borrow it now, build businesses, and be not-poor in the future, thereby reinforcing the preclusion of the more egalitarin futures.
@huopa Likewise, Darth Melon does not fund his new companies with his old wealth; instead, he funds them by borrowing money from the banks, at the premise that since he's a sillionaire now, he will be a sillionaire in the future, and therefore can have the money that he will have in the future now already. If we didn't live in the stupidest timeline, people who have actually good ideas would have a competitive advantage at pulling money from that better timeline's future to its present over sillionaires, whose premise in our stupid timeline is just that the society's shape prevents them from ever becoming non-sillionaires.
@huopa So, you don't know how banks work.
Here, read this gentle introduction: https://toot.cat/@riley/115023671302432559
@riley @benroyce Heh, was a funny poetic description of banking.. so I don't disagree at all with that description in principle.
The original point in the WSJ article though was that stronger governments are better in keeping violence in bay, statistically speaking. War has been a way to form the stronger governments, according to the article. This has hold true in the big picture up until now I guess..
.. but back to the point of how to redistribute wealth.
@huopa Taxing is a different mechanism. You can also do democracy by creating money in the future of the projects that the people want to be implemented, and, should that be necessary[1], by ordering banks to suck that money into the present when people want to use it in order to implement the projects and thus ensure that the money in their future will exist and be avaiable to be sucked into the present. Round and round it goes, as Harlan the Technician would have said.
[1] In theory[2], the incentive of the money clearly and credibly existing in specific points of the proper future should be enough to convince banks to suck it out, but experience such as "redlining" shows that banksters are not always greedy bastards. Sometimes, they're racist bastards.
[2] The creditless "efficient markets theory", that is.
@huopa WSJ, as usual, tries to do economics without the equations, and forgets that the kind of governments that would eagerly go to war create, on balance, more violence that needs to be held at bay than they can hold at bay by doing violence they approve of upon the people whom they incentivised to do violence that they disapprove of.
@riley @benroyce to be fair to WSJ though, this article was Opinion article. I would also say the title of this Opinion is not perfectly chosen, probably for click-bait reasons..
I agree totally though on what you said. The whole economics of going to the war has probably been analyzed many times over.. btw, Thomas Piketty wrote about the egalitarian nature of large wars. Everybody become so poor that Gini coefficient becomes very low.. not ideal solution, but it creates more wealth equality.
ᴮᵉⁿ ᴿᵒʸᶜᵉVOTE IN THE PRIMARIES
Keith
Kevin Russell
Riley S. Faelan
Jestbill
tlariv
SBartsch ✅
BarbabluM
ProScience 🇪🇺
John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmit
James M.
Nazo
Petra van Cronenburg
Stage name Jay Peach
Janis
Aurora 🐌
KanaMauna
filobus
Dying World 🔥🌎🔥
andrew773
Patch You Up
Tropical Chaos
Ω 🌍 Gus Posey
neverbeaten
bk
🔏 Matthias Wiesmann
morton
Klara ❤️
DeanFarrell
Trezzer (aka Helvedeshunden)
Sara
Mother Anarchy
SearingTruth
Huopa