The acceptance of risk and seemingly crazy leaps of inspiration woven into American attitudes, he said, help produce a research environment that nowhere else can quite match.

American exceptionalism BS.

This really comes down to technocrats vs the people. The technocrats want to double down on neoliberalism because many economists and other experts are telling them it’s the only way. The field of economics, especially in the US is mostly just a cult of free market evangelists. Technocrats like Klein believe in listening to experts, which I would normally strongly agree with, but I just can’t listen to experts who advise that we double down on the same god damn policies that have left so many millions of Americans feeling left behind, desperate, and hopeless. It’s insanity.

I didn’t mean to imply that I think what I’m suggesting is possible in the current system. I should have made that more clear. That’s my fault. I understand that what I’m talking about would require significant systemic changes. To you, that might essentially make it impossible, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. People made the existing system, there’s no reason why people couldn’t make a different system.

False equivalency.

It’s a good thing not everyone is as arrogantly resistant to new possibilities as you, otherwise human progress might cease entirely.

“The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.”

• Murray Bookchin

When you print money, it devalues all the existing money because there’s more of it but the extra value it generates hasn’t materialised yet.

Money doesn’t have value. Money is just a medium of exchange. It can be anything, a pebble, a shell, a small piece of metal, a piece of paper, or, most commonly today, digits in a computer. Things are what have value. Consumer products and services, raw materials, etc. Money is just a stand-in for those things. Simply increasing the amount of digits in the computer isn’t going to suddenly increase prices. What would affect prices is if you transferred a bunch of that newly created money into everyone’s checking accounts, all at once. That would lead to inflation, because, as I already said, if you put money into people’s hands (or checking accounts) they’re going to spend it. This would increase the number of dollars pursuing goods and services, but the amount of goods and services wouldn’t increase right away, so there would be more money relative to the same number of things, and prices would go up. So, just don’t transfer all of the newly created money into people’s checking accounts.

Like I said, put some of it into an account that can only be used to pay bond holders. You know, the people the US Federal government owes all their money to. That money would trickle out of the Treasury department as the Treasury made payments to bond holders, it wouldn’t just be some big, sudden cash infusion into the broader economy. The same is true of using the money for Federal infrastructure projects.

I’m not suggesting the Federal government should default on its debt. Not at all. They should pay back bond holders, at interest. All except one: the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve doesn’t need to be paid back because they’re the ones who create the money, and they can manage the creation of the money so that it doesn’t lead to too high of inflation.

All of this is just so stupid, it’s so unnecessary. There’s no reason growth must be correlated with increased debt. The Federal government doesn’t need to borrow money for anything, they create their own money. They don’t need to go to people and say, “hey, lend me some of your dollars so I can pay for the army, or roads and bridges,” they can just make more dollars. The US Federal government is a sovereign currency issuer, they make the money. You wouldn’t need to borrow money from your friend if you had a legal money printer at home that could print an infinite number of dollars.

But I know, inflation. Yes, if the Federal government made a bunch of money and went around dropping it out of hot air balloons, inflation would go up. When people get money in their hands they tend to want to spend it, this causes increased demand, supply can’t necessarily keep up with the sudden increase in demand and you get inflation. There’s a pretty easy solution to this problem: don’t print a bunch of money and just hand it out to people. Print it, and use it to fund infrastructure projects or public services. Put some of it in an account that can only be used to make payments to bond holders. I know the infrastructure projects would mean money being put into the hands of the people who work on those projects, but I doubt that would increase the overall inflation rate very much, and if it did you could always just pull back on the infrastructure spending when inflation was high and ramp it back up when the inflation rate goes lower.

That’s just not how politics works in the US. Politics is a career, or in many cases a stepping stone to a career. They’re not there to fight anyone, they’re there to achieve their personal ambitions. They’re not ideological warriors, they’re white collar elites. They don’t necessarily have any ideological commitments, and as such they will simply adopt whatever the ideological paradigm is at any given time.

I don’t expect any politician to fight Trump, if doing so means compromising their career ambitions. If there’s going to be a fight, it has to be fought by the people, not the politicians.

I understand why the Democrats want to try to resolve conflicts peacefully. No reasonable person wants violence. However, what the Democrats perceive as compromise is actually often appeasement. The Republicans use the threat of violence to extort the Democrats, and the Democrats often concede because they don’t feel like they have any other choice. But appeasement does not prevent violence, it only delays it. The only real solution is the destruction of the extortionists.

What else do you expect from them?

Very little.

I don’t expect AOC and her octogenarian colleagues to strap on an assault rifle and go full commando, but they do need to recognize what the Republicans are already well aware of: not all conflicts can be resolved peacefully.

The Republicans are more than willing to use all tools at their disposal to achieve their goals. If the Democrats are not, then they are putting themselves at a severe disadvantage.

You can’t defeat an enemy that you refuse to fight.

I’m sure the Democrats will take every legal avenue available to them. However, if they run out of legal, nonviolent options, they’re going to be in a very rough spot because they don’t have any other arrows in their quiver.

It really depends on how you define “successful.” If your measure of success is based on how closely these societies resemble Western, liberal, capitalist societies, then, yeah, you’re probably not going to see a whole lot of “success,” but that’s not what these revolutionary movements were trying to achieve. I would say that first and foremost what essentially every communist movement was striving for was just autonomy and independence, and many have been successful in that regard. Vietnam is an independent nation, instead of a French colony. China, similarly, is no longer under the thumb of the British. You may not like what these nations do with their autonomy, but that is what they were striving for and they have achieved it.

Remember Musk’s cameo in Iron Man 2? People were even calling him the “real Tony Stark.” Or when Musk guest starred on The Simpsons, and Lisa called him “possibly the greatest living inventor,” even though Musk has never invented anything in his life?

With the benefit of hindsight, this was clearly ludicrous, but even at the time it should’ve been obvious to everyone that it was nonsense. Unfortunately, it wasn’t obvious to everyone, many people bought it. That’s scary. It’s scary that a megalomaniacal narcissist with enough money can convince large numbers of people that they are something that they are not.

I think the US is a lost cause. The fact is, most Americans like this country the way it is. Sure, plenty of Americans don’t like Trump, but, for most of those people, if they could replace Trump but keep everything else more or less the same, they would be perfectly content to do so.

I want to secede from the Union.

Call me the Dude, because I hate the fuckin’ Eagles. Good for Jalen Hurts, though. I mean, I don’t know if he’s making a political statement or he just doesn’t like Big Macs, but, either way, cool.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) has urged her Democratic colleagues to stop attacking the “oligarchy” on Thursday, arguing that the word did not resonate with most Americans

Everyone believes that their politics are the politics of MOST Americans, but reality is more complicated than that. I’m not sure that anyone can say what most of the roughly 260 million voting age Americans think, about much of anything, really. Yes, polling can give us some insights, but polls are inherently flawed.

The fact is, the American people are complex. They believe many things, and some of the things they believe contradict other things they believe; and just because an American thinks a certain way today, that doesn’t mean they’ll think that way tomorrow. Plus, we just have such a large and diverse populace, spread out across fifty states. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to point to any one American and say, “that person represents most Americans.”

If I had to guess, I’d say that most Americans don’t give a rats ass about oligarchy or kings. If they could live their lives the way they wanted under an oligarchy or a king, they’d be fine with it. Kings, oligarchs, emperors, despots, who gives a shit, as long as the price of eggs doesn’t go up too much. I think what matters to most Americans isn’t semantic, philosophical or ideological, but material. I think most Americans would be perfectly content to live under a king, if under that king they were able to live a decent, middle class life.

But, that’s just my guess. Again, it’s hard for anyone to say what most Americans want or think or believe.

I’m not Conservative.

And who decides what is or is not “morally repugnant?” You? Are you the arbiter of objectively, universal moral truth? You must be, if you think anyone needs to seek your approval before taking a paying job.

I have no desire to be a famous celebrity, so I’m thankful that I’ll never be one. But, you’re right, if I were a celebrity I would have to demonstrate more tact. Luckily for Frost, he needn’t tell these obnoxious assholes to fuck off, because they’re not relevant enough to warrant such attention. Disabling comments on a few social media posts is sufficient.