It's a common American view that the other countries weren't spending "enough", whereas from the perspective of everyone else on the planet it's America that's spending a hugely disproportionate amount of wealth on killing, and just expecting its allies to do the same.
skisnow
joined 3 months ago
I wish they were just removing themselves from the world stage. What they're actually doing is shifting away from a model of direct co-operation with allied nations and strong economic ties with otherwise less friendly nations, to unilateral action wherever and whenever they feel like it.
Their foreign policy isn't moving towards isolationism, it's moving towards unchecked fascist domination.
Schroedinger's billionaires. They're propping up the economy with all the tax they pay, but they'll leave if they have to pay tax.
Whenever I see anything like this I remember my days working for large American companies and how difficult it was, even as a senior engineer, to get spending approval for anything. Like, even a $20 replacement headset I had to keep resubmitting applications for for three weeks because the managers had a policy of rejecting every first request on the theory that if it was important enough to spend company money on, it was important enough to fill in the form twice.
The point being, these sorts of people do not hand out a single penny without running the numbers and realising that the cost of rigging an election multiplied by the probability of success, is still lower than what they'll financially gain from it going a certain way.
You're exemplifying my point quite well there, in terms of debating from the perspective of your own very precise no-true-Scotsman definition.
But to answer you at face value, let's have a look in wikipedia's opening paragraph on Capitalism:
This socioeconomic system has developed historically through several stages and is defined by a number of basic constituent elements: private property, profit motive, capital accumulation, competitive markets, commodification, wage labor, and an emphasis on innovation and economic growth.
It's going to be a struggle convincing the developed world, or even the majority of left-leaning voters, that owning your own home, earning a company salary, paying people for services rendered, or market competition all need abolishing. Most people just want to see a bit more market regulation, monopoly busting, worker protections, social welfare, money removed from politics, and the rich paying their share of tax.
This is the huge problem with the wider debate; hardcore leftists have a very specific well-defined meaning in mind when they use the word "Capitalism", whereas the majority of the general public think "Capitalism" just means "you can start a business if you want".
"Neoliberalism" doesn't work in most rhetoric either because it's got the word "liberal" in it. We need a new word that's unambiguously understood to refer to the specific components of capitalism that are objectionable.
Poe's Law strikes again. It's such an astonishingly stupid argument that I can never tell when someone's joking when they say it.
downvoted for that website's super illegal "pay us to not track you" policy
George Jetson's work week was one hour a day, two days a week. That's what we were promised we'd get once everything was automated, not that Spacely Space Sprockets would make us work 60 hours a week and pocket all the extra productivity for themselves.
Is the 480Hz support "just because", or is there any kind of use case for it?
The distressing thing for me is knowing that a lot of my friends (and exes) are exactly the sort of people that'll just absent-mindedly click OK without reading it and share every single photo they've ever taken of me; photos which Facebook's facial recognition will easily tag.