Stats for nerds
2recommend
6mentions
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2013–2025years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Is it a surprise to you that I haven't fully encoded the current world order in one HN comment?
Just as the press usurped our power to block us out of it. Trump usurped the media's power (through his own showmanship) to block them out of it (this was the only reason CNN libs were mad really). At the end of the day Trump did the bidding of the common backgrounds interests so he was allowed to play the part:
- Sold $100s of billions of weapons to dictators (MIC) - His anti-china policy was solely to stop their EVs from taking over the gas car market in the US (Oil & Gas) - Escalated tensions in the middle east to keep netanyahu in power through the Abraham Weapons Deal and moving the US embassy illegally to Jerusalem (Foreign Interests)
The politicians, the media, they fall over, and fight amongst, each other to be top slave to these same various lobbies. The public are only there insofar to keep the facade in-tact, every 4 years people stand in line to larp as casting directors in the great pantomime. Most western states do not live in free, representative democracies - all the ones with significant sway have been totally usurped (in other countries we'd call it coups).
And unfortunately, the tech industry is now going in that direction (with YC now accepting MIC projects, lazy zero-alpha investors and VCs are crawling to the DoD infinite-money-glitch teat).
Read "Silent Coup" by Matt Kennard & Claire Provost[https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Silent_Coup/gjmvEAAAQ...]
- Sure: two somewhat recent books that cover this are "Silent Coup" by Claire Provost and Matt Kennard, and "The Divide" by Jason Hickel. Another that covers this topic is "Superimperialism" by Michael Hudson.
The purpose of the IMF is not to help countries out of some kind of benevolence, it's to use debt as a control mechanism over other countries.
- In case you don't see the comment above, a few books that I know cover this topic include "Superimperialism" (Hudson), "Silent Coup" (Kennard), and "The Divide" (Hickel).
- This is the premise of the book "Silent Coup".
It explores how western companies use the the Investor–state dispute settlement system to usurp the will of countries to control their own resources. ICC (International Chamber of Commerce in Switzerland) and the World Bank (via ICSID) are the main arbitration venues for this corporate bullying/neocolonialism.
Then of course, as soon as that arbitration is ignored/won then the genocidal defenders of democracy are activated.
If you pull the thread on many conflicts, at some point you will find these courts.
I'm not a fan of the Chinese government but I hope the Chinese firms/people involved use these same systems against the Dutch government.
- First of all: your current society has no chance at a future, AI overlords, mogul trillionaires, climate change and so on being the least currently concerning of your issues.
Nevertheless, one counter-intuitive policy which would end corporate control [1] (hence will never be implemented, again, no future for you) is supra-unitary taxation: effectively, tax rates above 100%, ensuring that the corporation has by default a lifetime (like a person they wish to be). Once the forever-in-debt corporation gets past a certain level of debt, it gets liquidated. Of course, corporations affected by this would have a certain scale (above $10 trillion, let's say) and a certain domain of activity (embedded AI, synthetic biology, nuclear fusion, asteroid mining, and similar).
[1] 2023, Claire Provost, Matt Kennard, Silent Coup. How Corporations Overthrew Democracy, Bloomsbury Academic, https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/silent-coup-9781350270008
- No, we're not at all in agreement that "Nixon was a criminal" (details on request ... although, it's been 4 decades in general, and a couple decades since I read Silent Coup).
Therefore prosecuting him because he was an anti-Communist Republican would not have been good. While this doesn't address my greater point, look at all the bogus prosecutions of Reagan Administration officials.
My greater point is about the arena that Ford decisively closed off with his pardon. Historically, when a Republic degrades to the point where leaders don't dare lose power, because they'll lose their freedom and frequently in time past their lives, that Republic dies an ugly death.
Perhaps you weren't alive/politically aware back then, but the country did Move On, Nixon and Watergate, which had consumed it, often to the exclusion of very important external issues, just stopped being a, let alone the top issue of the day. We Moved On to the supposedly clumsy Gerald Ford (he did have a bad knee from college football, but this was greatly exaggerated), Whip Inflation Now, Swine Flu, but seriously, the general business of the nation.
