Notice how Ian and who is notorious for bring up the Fed as the cause of every problem doesn’t understand that the Fed doesn’t issue bonds? This is representative of how little everyone understands of the real world mechanics of the U.S. dollar.
I really wish that someone would create a document just explaining how the current monetary system functions, while leaving out completely all of the history. Tell people how it works. If readers want the history or superior alternatives, they can go some place else to find out, but just getting them to understand how it functions is difficult enough of a task, especially including things like the private market bond auctions the fed uses (I don’t even understand this mechanism) so they can truly see what racket the whole thing is.
“I really wish that someone would create a document just explaining how the current monetary system functions, while leaving out completely all of the history. Tell people how it works.”
“What Does the Fed Do?” with James Grant — Ron Paul Fed Lecture Series, Pt 2/3
[www]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRipVd5wxhI
And, of course:
The Fed as Giant Counterfeiter
by Robert P. Murphy
[www]https://mises.org/library/fed-giant-counterfeiter
Well, now that we’ve reduced ourselves to “quoting” a comment:
“…a document…” That first link is out.
“… while leaving out completely all of the history.” The second didn’t meet that requirement.
People don’t know any of the history, so telling it to them just makes them confused because you are trying to teach them (1)how the money works and (2) the history of money or a comparison with how money used to work.
There is too much summarizing. It’s just hand-wavey “buy from private dealers”. Which dealers? How much money? This is the kind of factual information that gets people pissed.
I’m about 15 minutes into this video, and so far I feel like it’s much easier for me to relate to than your Jordan Peterson video, and I agree that it’s ridiculous for them to just replace discontented workers who were fired for not obeying their demands with military guys.
However, because I am prone to nitpicking, I would like to point out that this part of the transcript:
15:46
yeah so you’re free to go into the woods
15:48
right so even i agree with that you are
So, in much of the United States, the woods are actually highly regulated. If you look at the rules for camping in the National Parks or National Forests or State Parks… yes, you can do it to some extent, but there are a lot of rules that would be pretty hard to follow without money. In many places, you aren’t allowed to camp without paying money, and only in designated areas. In other places, you can technically camp without paying money, but you’re required to move your camp every two weeks, and the distance requirement is such that it would be difficult for many people to do without some form of motorized transportation like a car.
As for whether you are allowed to hunt and gather food from the land, the laws seem to vary a lot from place to place, but it is generally heavily regulated to the point where it would be pretty hard for someone to live as a hunter gatherer without breaking any laws. There might be some exceptions for people of American Indian heritage who have treaty rights that apply to them, but then again, the United States is not known for honoring treaties with American Indians. That’s not to say there aren’t some people who don’t do it illegally anyway, but for obvious reasons, that’s tough, not something I’d expect Ironically, it’s probably more legal to take up panhandling as a profession, even though panhandling is much less in accord with nature than hunting and gathering.
Another point is that China doesn’t have communism. (Something about “chinese state communism” is mentioned about 8 minutes into the video.) Considering how much Marx and other communist philosophers cared about worker’s rights, I don’t think any society that sends people to prison and forced labor for alleged “crimes” such as worshipping in an unlicensed church can be considered “communist”. Note that the United States also sentences people to forced labor in prisons for things that shouldn’t be considered crimes, so I’m really not convinced that there’s such a huge difference between the United States and China the way many people pretend, except that the United States is way more imperialist and oppressive against people who live outside of its official borders.
The article mentions that nearly half of the inmates being forced to work without pay in Texas prisons are there for “nonviolent charges”.
And for comparison, a similar problem in China is documented in the top search result here:
google [dot] com/search?q=site%3Aaljazeera.com+21st+century+evil+prison+%22China+is+the+world%E2%80%99s+factory%2C+but+does+a+dark+secret+lurk+behind+this+apparent+success+story%3F
Also, even accepting that there are a lot of people in China for whom the word “communism” clearly means something very different than it meant for Marx or other philosophers who cared a lot about worker’s rights, I remember watching a documentary about China which made it quite clear to me that even members of the Chinese Communist Party don’t believe they’ve achieved communism. One of the people interviewed said, “Communism is the dream of all progressive people.” The documentary makers did not elaborate and explain what exactly this dream meant to this person; however, if nothing else, it shows that the person thought of communism as a goal to be achieved, not as something already accomplished. Also the documentary had something about how some people within China believed they needed to deregulate in order to eventually achieve communism, but still no clarification about what they believed communism was. I’ll let you know if I can remember what documentary it was.
I acknowledge I am responding to things which were only briefly mentioned and not of great significance to the main points being raised in the first 15 minutes of your video. Overall I agree with you so far that they are basically suppressing workers’ negotiating power by replacing them with military people. (Though you didn’t use quite those words. Those are my words.)
Ah, I should have listened longer before replying to that point about going to live in the woods.
Around 16 minutes 38 seconds in, Tim Pool does acknowledge that foraging and farming on one’s own isn’t really much of an option for a lot of people anymore.
“I don’t think any society that sends people to prison and forced labor for alleged “crimes” such as worshipping in an unlicensed church can be considered “communist”.”
Presumably, you think it’s a crime to act in ways that are subversive to your socialist ideals.
Like meeting to disseminate “misinformation” about health, selling “unlicenced” firearms, meeting to engage in commerce that the government cannot track for purposes of a social credit type of system, etc.
That’s what these churches taught, and, in America, they were instrumental in fighting off Great Britain.
Just another contradiction in what you say you want out of socialism, and what socialism actually requires.
Admit it: When push comes to shove, you do oppose worship at unlicenced churches because the religions of these churches are hostile to your socialist beliefs.
“Considering how much Marx and other communist philosophers cared about worker’s rights”
See, this is yet another example of socialists failing to compartmentalize.
It doesn’t matter that Communists *CARE* or *WANT* to care about workers’ rights. The economics of socialism/communism, followed to its logical conclusion, necessarily leads to violations of workers’ rights.
Socialist goals are inherently contradictory.
For example: You can’t force businesses to pay a Minimum Wage without also preventing unskilled workers from working.
No-brainer. But Socialists are going to destroy people’s lives to pursue the fantasy of equity.
Or, as Thomas Leonard has pointed out, Progressive ideals are contradictory:
Excluding Inferior Workers: Eugenic Influences On Economic Reform In The Progressive Era [PPT]
[www]http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/Excluding.ppt
“Thus did progressives advocate for labor, even as they depicted many groups of poor workers as threats – the cause rather than the consequence of low wages.
“Thus did progressives advocate for women’s rights, even as they also promoted a maternalist vision of economic and family life that would remove women from the labor force, the better to meet women’s obligations to be “mothers of the race,” and to defer to the “family wage”.
“Thus did progressives advocate for peace, even as they founded their opposition to war on its putatively dysgenic effects, and championed making the world safe for democracy.
“Thus did progressives argue for more democracy (via secret ballot, referendum, direct election), even as they proposed to limit democratic control over the technocratic agencies they devised and staffed.
“Thus did progressives seek to countervail corporate power, even as they admired the scientifically managed corporation, regarding its planning, organization and efficiency as an exemplar for the reform of government.”
There might be some exceptions for people of American Indian heritage who have treaty rights that apply to them, but then again, the United States is not known for honoring treaties with American Indians.
You can imagine how Australians are feeling over the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal … I’m open to suggestions if you have better ideas, but the other choice was France and they didn’t actually deliver anything (admittedly we asked for something ridiculous but they should have refused to take our money).
We have done so much to make the Americans love us … we went to Vietnam, we went to Iraq, and Afghanistan. We offer Pine Gap, and over the horizon radar.
Hey on the topic of the American Indians … did you notice how enthusiastic they were in joining up with the US military effort, even after how their people were treated? They signed up as code talkers and even as regular infantry grunts, and they fought hard. They are a warrior culture, the way to earn respect is to be brave and prove you can fight.
You can imagine how Australians are feeling over the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal … I’m open to suggestions if you have better ideas, but the other choice was France and they didn’t actually deliver anything (admittedly we asked for something ridiculous but they should have refused to take our money).
I actually didn’t hear anything about it until you mentioned it. I confess I do not pay much attention to mainstream news unless a) it comes up in a web search for a topic I am interested in, or b) someone brings it to my attention. I just looked it up and am somewhat confused still.
According to the Guardian, “Essential poll: majority of Australians back Aukus submarine pact, but fear it will inflame tensions with China”
We have done so much to make the Americans love us … we went to Vietnam, we went to Iraq, and Afghanistan. We offer Pine Gap, and over the horizon radar.
There will always be *some* US citizens who love Australia (or any other given foreign country), on a more abstract level, most US citizens are too self-absorbed to care much about country other than the United States. The fact that US citizens use the term “Americans” to refer solely to citizens and residents of the United States — ignoring all the citizens and residents of the rest of North, Central, and South America — is a symptom of this. (I confess I sometimes make this mistake myself, because it is so much a part of US culture as to become habitual even when one is aware one some level that one should not be doing it.)
Another symptom of this self-absorption is the fact that the term “pro-life” in the United States is used by most people to refer solely to opposition to the abortion of unborn babies, and, so far as most US citizens and residents are concerned, has nothing whatsoever to do with one’s opinion about the bombing of people residing in other countries. The unborn babies are potential soon-to-be US citizens, you see, and the people residing in countries being bombed by the US are not likely to become citizens anytime soon, and even if they did, a lot of US citizens wouldn’t want them to, because, you know, racism.
Another symptom of US self-absorption is the fact that the term “entitlement” in US politics is almost always used to describe welfare programs, the debate being whether nor not welfare recipients are morally entitled to taxpayer money, but since they are at least legally entitled, the term “entitlement” works regardless of which side (or lack thereof) of the debate you are on. In contrast, the term “entitlement” in US politics is almost never used to describe the sense of entitlement that US corporations (including ones with a major presence here, even if they are technically incorporated elsewhere) feel to the labor, land, lives, and resources of people residing in other countries. For example, the sense of entitlement that Shell feels to murder Nigerians in the process of stealing their oil; the sense of entitlement that the United Fruit Company felt to overthrow Guatemala’s budding anti-forced labor pro-land-reform democracy and support a genocide just to maintain their legal title to stolen lands they weren’t even using; and the sense of entitlement that Nestle feels to used forced child labor in the Ivory Coast and not even have to pay reparations a few decades later. You see, US taxpayers are US citizens or at least residents, whereas kidnapped forced labor victims in the Ivory Coast, genocide victims in Guatemala, and murder victims in Nigeria are not.
I could go on, but where I am going with this is that most US citizens are too self-absorbed with US politics to pay much attention to what is happening in the rest of the world, except to periodically declare that the USA is the best. This is part of what allows many US Democrats to keep voting for a party that bombs other countries inhabited by mostly non-white people, and still believe they aren’t racist. Speaking of which, several of those raging white supremacists I mentioned I spoke to a few weeks ago, the ones who thought I was “crazy” for not agreeing with them that (according to them) black people benefitted from sl*very, self-identified as Democrats. To me this is further evidence that the US Democrat party is actually a far right wing party, maybe ever so slightly to the left of the US Republican party, but still, far right wing.
Tel wrote,
Hey on the topic of the American Indians … did you notice how enthusiastic they were in joining up with the US military effort, even after how their people were treated? They signed up as code talkers and even as regular infantry grunts, and they fought hard. They are a warrior culture, the way to earn respect is to be brave and prove you can fight.
The American Indians are technically an abstract term used to refer to a variety of cultural groups, some of which are warrior cultures and some of which are not. I believe members from at least 15 American Indian nations, including the Navajos, Choctaws, Cherokees, and Comanches signed up as code talkers.
To be continued… I realize this is an awkward breaking point, but I need to step away from the computer, and don’t want to lose my progress on this reply.
Regarding some but not all American Indians having warrior cultures, here is an example of a group of peaceful Delaware Indians who adopted Christianity and were subsequently massacred by a settler militia from Pennsylvania under the command of David Williamson.
From “An Indigenous People’s History of the United States” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
The settlers’ escalation of extreme violence in the Ohio Country led to perhaps the most outrageous war crime, which showed that Indigenous conversion to Christianity and pacifism was no protection from genocide. Moravian missionizing among the ravaged Delaware communities in Pennsylvania had produced three Moravian Indian villages in the decades before the war for independence had begun. Residents of one of the settlements, named Gnadenhütten, in eastern Ohio, were displaced by British troops during fighting in the area, but were able to return to harvest their corn. Soon afterward, in March 1782, a settler militia from Pennsylvania under the command of David Williamson appeared and rounded up the Delawares, telling them they had to evacuate for their own safety. There were forty-two men, twenty women, and thirty-four children in the group of Delawares. The militiamen searched their belongings to confiscate anything that could be used as a weapon, then announced that they were all to be killed, accusing them of having given refuge to Delawares who had killed white people. They were also accused of stealing the household items and tools they possessed, because such items should only belong to white people. Condemned to death, the Delawares spent the night praying and singing hymns. In the morning, Williamson’s men marched over ninety people in pairs into two houses and methodically slaughtered them. One killer bragged that he personally had bludgeoned fourteen victims with a cooper’s mallet, which he had then handed to an accomplice. “My arm fails me,” he was said to have announced. “Go on with the work.”45 This action set a new bar for violence, and atrocities that followed routinely surpassed even that atrocity.46
A year earlier, the Delaware leader Buckongeahelas had addressed a group of Christianized Delawares, saying that he had known some good white men, but that the good ones were a small number:
“They do what they please. They enslave those who are not of their color, although created by the same Great Spirit who created us. They would make slaves of us if they could, but as they cannot do it, they kill us. There is no faith to be placed in their words. They are not like the Indians, who are only enemies while at war, and are friends in peace. They will say to an Indian: “My friend, my brother.” They will take him by the hand, and at the same moment destroy him. And so you will also be treated by them before long. Remember that this day I have warned you to beware of such friends as these. I know the long knives; they are not to be trusted.”47
I finished listening to your discussion with Tim Pool, and overall it was much easier to follow and relate to than your discussion with Jordan Peterson.
The stuff that you guys are talking about where people are required to get the vaccine if they want to keep certain jobs, and thus people who really don’t want to are getting it done (Tim Pool hones in on that about 18 minutes 20 seconds in in, I think, but that’s after the conversation had been going on for awhile), and also about 16 minutes 38 where Tim Pool describes how foraging and farming isn’t really an option for a lot of people anymore: this is a rather socialist way of looking at the problem. (Although in other parts of the discussion, other perspectives are described.) The people in power have taken much of the land (there are multiple historical examples of this: the genocide of the American Indians to steal there land, the kidnapping of black people from Africa, the enclosures in England, the conquest of Ireland, etc etc), and then once the people in power have the land, obtained by conquest, genocide, etc, they basically tell people: live as we tell you to live, or else.
So far as I can tell, you and Tim Pool don’t really go into much detail about unjust land acquisition, aside from the part about landlords who make bad investments getting bailed out with government money, but I think it would strengthen your argument, if you pointed out that many of the employers mandating vaccines (admittedly, because the government told them to, at least in some cases) as a condition of employment, don’t necessarily have valid moral title to their land anyway.
So, in this particular discussion, people’s lack of access to land for hunting/gathering/farming/herding is being exploited to get them to go along with a medical procedure they don’t want.
The same basic criticism can be made for how people’s lack of access to land for hunting/gathering/farming/herding is being exploited to get them to go along with sexual harassment (up to and including rape) or any number of other undesirable things that might make a person say, “you know, I’d rather herd goats (or whatever) than deal with this.”
For an explanation of how lack of access to land (and, additionally, the threat of deportation) is used to make many women in the United States put up with rape in the agricultural industry, please the the documentary, “Rape in the Fields”. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/rape-in-the-fields/transcript/
In the documentary, the people being exploited are farmworkers. It’s not as if they don’t have farming skills. But for various reasons (immigration status, lack of money), they aren’t allowed to farm their own land, and are instead required to get jobs farming for other people if they wish to earn money, and some of the people they work for take advantage of their vulnerabilities to get away with raping them.
Notice how Ian and who is notorious for bring up the Fed as the cause of every problem doesn’t understand that the Fed doesn’t issue bonds? This is representative of how little everyone understands of the real world mechanics of the U.S. dollar.
I really wish that someone would create a document just explaining how the current monetary system functions, while leaving out completely all of the history. Tell people how it works. If readers want the history or superior alternatives, they can go some place else to find out, but just getting them to understand how it functions is difficult enough of a task, especially including things like the private market bond auctions the fed uses (I don’t even understand this mechanism) so they can truly see what racket the whole thing is.
“I really wish that someone would create a document just explaining how the current monetary system functions, while leaving out completely all of the history. Tell people how it works.”
“What Does the Fed Do?” with James Grant — Ron Paul Fed Lecture Series, Pt 2/3
[www]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRipVd5wxhI
And, of course:
The Fed as Giant Counterfeiter
by Robert P. Murphy
[www]https://mises.org/library/fed-giant-counterfeiter
Well, now that we’ve reduced ourselves to “quoting” a comment:
“…a document…” That first link is out.
“… while leaving out completely all of the history.” The second didn’t meet that requirement.
People don’t know any of the history, so telling it to them just makes them confused because you are trying to teach them (1)how the money works and (2) the history of money or a comparison with how money used to work.
There is too much summarizing. It’s just hand-wavey “buy from private dealers”. Which dealers? How much money? This is the kind of factual information that gets people pissed.
So nice!
I’m about 15 minutes into this video, and so far I feel like it’s much easier for me to relate to than your Jordan Peterson video, and I agree that it’s ridiculous for them to just replace discontented workers who were fired for not obeying their demands with military guys.
However, because I am prone to nitpicking, I would like to point out that this part of the transcript:
So, in much of the United States, the woods are actually highly regulated. If you look at the rules for camping in the National Parks or National Forests or State Parks… yes, you can do it to some extent, but there are a lot of rules that would be pretty hard to follow without money. In many places, you aren’t allowed to camp without paying money, and only in designated areas. In other places, you can technically camp without paying money, but you’re required to move your camp every two weeks, and the distance requirement is such that it would be difficult for many people to do without some form of motorized transportation like a car.
As for whether you are allowed to hunt and gather food from the land, the laws seem to vary a lot from place to place, but it is generally heavily regulated to the point where it would be pretty hard for someone to live as a hunter gatherer without breaking any laws. There might be some exceptions for people of American Indian heritage who have treaty rights that apply to them, but then again, the United States is not known for honoring treaties with American Indians. That’s not to say there aren’t some people who don’t do it illegally anyway, but for obvious reasons, that’s tough, not something I’d expect Ironically, it’s probably more legal to take up panhandling as a profession, even though panhandling is much less in accord with nature than hunting and gathering.
Another point is that China doesn’t have communism. (Something about “chinese state communism” is mentioned about 8 minutes into the video.) Considering how much Marx and other communist philosophers cared about worker’s rights, I don’t think any society that sends people to prison and forced labor for alleged “crimes” such as worshipping in an unlicensed church can be considered “communist”. Note that the United States also sentences people to forced labor in prisons for things that shouldn’t be considered crimes, so I’m really not convinced that there’s such a huge difference between the United States and China the way many people pretend, except that the United States is way more imperialist and oppressive against people who live outside of its official borders.
For information about prison labor in the United States, specifically Texas (though it happens in other states too), see the top search result here:
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Atexasobserver.org+%22penal+system+today%22+%22lawmakers+finally+start+to+talk+about+unpaid+labor+in+texas+prisons%22
The article mentions that nearly half of the inmates being forced to work without pay in Texas prisons are there for “nonviolent charges”.
And for comparison, a similar problem in China is documented in the top search result here:
google [dot] com/search?q=site%3Aaljazeera.com+21st+century+evil+prison+%22China+is+the+world%E2%80%99s+factory%2C+but+does+a+dark+secret+lurk+behind+this+apparent+success+story%3F
Also, even accepting that there are a lot of people in China for whom the word “communism” clearly means something very different than it meant for Marx or other philosophers who cared a lot about worker’s rights, I remember watching a documentary about China which made it quite clear to me that even members of the Chinese Communist Party don’t believe they’ve achieved communism. One of the people interviewed said, “Communism is the dream of all progressive people.” The documentary makers did not elaborate and explain what exactly this dream meant to this person; however, if nothing else, it shows that the person thought of communism as a goal to be achieved, not as something already accomplished. Also the documentary had something about how some people within China believed they needed to deregulate in order to eventually achieve communism, but still no clarification about what they believed communism was. I’ll let you know if I can remember what documentary it was.
I acknowledge I am responding to things which were only briefly mentioned and not of great significance to the main points being raised in the first 15 minutes of your video. Overall I agree with you so far that they are basically suppressing workers’ negotiating power by replacing them with military people. (Though you didn’t use quite those words. Those are my words.)
Ah, I should have listened longer before replying to that point about going to live in the woods.
Around 16 minutes 38 seconds in, Tim Pool does acknowledge that foraging and farming on one’s own isn’t really much of an option for a lot of people anymore.
“I don’t think any society that sends people to prison and forced labor for alleged “crimes” such as worshipping in an unlicensed church can be considered “communist”.”
Presumably, you think it’s a crime to act in ways that are subversive to your socialist ideals.
Like meeting to disseminate “misinformation” about health, selling “unlicenced” firearms, meeting to engage in commerce that the government cannot track for purposes of a social credit type of system, etc.
That’s what these churches taught, and, in America, they were instrumental in fighting off Great Britain.
Just another contradiction in what you say you want out of socialism, and what socialism actually requires.
Admit it: When push comes to shove, you do oppose worship at unlicenced churches because the religions of these churches are hostile to your socialist beliefs.
“Considering how much Marx and other communist philosophers cared about worker’s rights”
See, this is yet another example of socialists failing to compartmentalize.
It doesn’t matter that Communists *CARE* or *WANT* to care about workers’ rights. The economics of socialism/communism, followed to its logical conclusion, necessarily leads to violations of workers’ rights.
Socialist goals are inherently contradictory.
For example: You can’t force businesses to pay a Minimum Wage without also preventing unskilled workers from working.
No-brainer. But Socialists are going to destroy people’s lives to pursue the fantasy of equity.
Or, as Thomas Leonard has pointed out, Progressive ideals are contradictory:
Excluding Inferior Workers: Eugenic Influences On Economic Reform In The Progressive Era [PPT]
[www]http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/Excluding.ppt
“Thus did progressives advocate for labor, even as they depicted many groups of poor workers as threats – the cause rather than the consequence of low wages.
“Thus did progressives advocate for women’s rights, even as they also promoted a maternalist vision of economic and family life that would remove women from the labor force, the better to meet women’s obligations to be “mothers of the race,” and to defer to the “family wage”.
“Thus did progressives advocate for peace, even as they founded their opposition to war on its putatively dysgenic effects, and championed making the world safe for democracy.
“Thus did progressives argue for more democracy (via secret ballot, referendum, direct election), even as they proposed to limit democratic control over the technocratic agencies they devised and staffed.
“Thus did progressives seek to countervail corporate power, even as they admired the scientifically managed corporation, regarding its planning, organization and efficiency as an exemplar for the reform of government.”
You can imagine how Australians are feeling over the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal … I’m open to suggestions if you have better ideas, but the other choice was France and they didn’t actually deliver anything (admittedly we asked for something ridiculous but they should have refused to take our money).
We have done so much to make the Americans love us … we went to Vietnam, we went to Iraq, and Afghanistan. We offer Pine Gap, and over the horizon radar.
Hey on the topic of the American Indians … did you notice how enthusiastic they were in joining up with the US military effort, even after how their people were treated? They signed up as code talkers and even as regular infantry grunts, and they fought hard. They are a warrior culture, the way to earn respect is to be brave and prove you can fight.
Tel wrote,
I actually didn’t hear anything about it until you mentioned it. I confess I do not pay much attention to mainstream news unless a) it comes up in a web search for a topic I am interested in, or b) someone brings it to my attention. I just looked it up and am somewhat confused still.
According to the Guardian, “Essential poll: majority of Australians back Aukus submarine pact, but fear it will inflame tensions with China”
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/28/essential-poll-majority-of-australians-back-aukus-submarine-pact-but-fear-it-will-inflame-tensions-with-china
Tel wrote,
There will always be *some* US citizens who love Australia (or any other given foreign country), on a more abstract level, most US citizens are too self-absorbed to care much about country other than the United States. The fact that US citizens use the term “Americans” to refer solely to citizens and residents of the United States — ignoring all the citizens and residents of the rest of North, Central, and South America — is a symptom of this. (I confess I sometimes make this mistake myself, because it is so much a part of US culture as to become habitual even when one is aware one some level that one should not be doing it.)
Another symptom of this self-absorption is the fact that the term “pro-life” in the United States is used by most people to refer solely to opposition to the abortion of unborn babies, and, so far as most US citizens and residents are concerned, has nothing whatsoever to do with one’s opinion about the bombing of people residing in other countries. The unborn babies are potential soon-to-be US citizens, you see, and the people residing in countries being bombed by the US are not likely to become citizens anytime soon, and even if they did, a lot of US citizens wouldn’t want them to, because, you know, racism.
Another symptom of US self-absorption is the fact that the term “entitlement” in US politics is almost always used to describe welfare programs, the debate being whether nor not welfare recipients are morally entitled to taxpayer money, but since they are at least legally entitled, the term “entitlement” works regardless of which side (or lack thereof) of the debate you are on. In contrast, the term “entitlement” in US politics is almost never used to describe the sense of entitlement that US corporations (including ones with a major presence here, even if they are technically incorporated elsewhere) feel to the labor, land, lives, and resources of people residing in other countries. For example, the sense of entitlement that Shell feels to murder Nigerians in the process of stealing their oil; the sense of entitlement that the United Fruit Company felt to overthrow Guatemala’s budding anti-forced labor pro-land-reform democracy and support a genocide just to maintain their legal title to stolen lands they weren’t even using; and the sense of entitlement that Nestle feels to used forced child labor in the Ivory Coast and not even have to pay reparations a few decades later. You see, US taxpayers are US citizens or at least residents, whereas kidnapped forced labor victims in the Ivory Coast, genocide victims in Guatemala, and murder victims in Nigeria are not.
I could go on, but where I am going with this is that most US citizens are too self-absorbed with US politics to pay much attention to what is happening in the rest of the world, except to periodically declare that the USA is the best. This is part of what allows many US Democrats to keep voting for a party that bombs other countries inhabited by mostly non-white people, and still believe they aren’t racist. Speaking of which, several of those raging white supremacists I mentioned I spoke to a few weeks ago, the ones who thought I was “crazy” for not agreeing with them that (according to them) black people benefitted from sl*very, self-identified as Democrats. To me this is further evidence that the US Democrat party is actually a far right wing party, maybe ever so slightly to the left of the US Republican party, but still, far right wing.
Tel wrote,
The American Indians are technically an abstract term used to refer to a variety of cultural groups, some of which are warrior cultures and some of which are not. I believe members from at least 15 American Indian nations, including the Navajos, Choctaws, Cherokees, and Comanches signed up as code talkers.
To be continued… I realize this is an awkward breaking point, but I need to step away from the computer, and don’t want to lose my progress on this reply.
Regarding some but not all American Indians having warrior cultures, here is an example of a group of peaceful Delaware Indians who adopted Christianity and were subsequently massacred by a settler militia from Pennsylvania under the command of David Williamson.
From “An Indigenous People’s History of the United States” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
I finished listening to your discussion with Tim Pool, and overall it was much easier to follow and relate to than your discussion with Jordan Peterson.
The stuff that you guys are talking about where people are required to get the vaccine if they want to keep certain jobs, and thus people who really don’t want to are getting it done (Tim Pool hones in on that about 18 minutes 20 seconds in in, I think, but that’s after the conversation had been going on for awhile), and also about 16 minutes 38 where Tim Pool describes how foraging and farming isn’t really an option for a lot of people anymore: this is a rather socialist way of looking at the problem. (Although in other parts of the discussion, other perspectives are described.) The people in power have taken much of the land (there are multiple historical examples of this: the genocide of the American Indians to steal there land, the kidnapping of black people from Africa, the enclosures in England, the conquest of Ireland, etc etc), and then once the people in power have the land, obtained by conquest, genocide, etc, they basically tell people: live as we tell you to live, or else.
So far as I can tell, you and Tim Pool don’t really go into much detail about unjust land acquisition, aside from the part about landlords who make bad investments getting bailed out with government money, but I think it would strengthen your argument, if you pointed out that many of the employers mandating vaccines (admittedly, because the government told them to, at least in some cases) as a condition of employment, don’t necessarily have valid moral title to their land anyway.
So, in this particular discussion, people’s lack of access to land for hunting/gathering/farming/herding is being exploited to get them to go along with a medical procedure they don’t want.
The same basic criticism can be made for how people’s lack of access to land for hunting/gathering/farming/herding is being exploited to get them to go along with sexual harassment (up to and including rape) or any number of other undesirable things that might make a person say, “you know, I’d rather herd goats (or whatever) than deal with this.”
For an explanation of how lack of access to land (and, additionally, the threat of deportation) is used to make many women in the United States put up with rape in the agricultural industry, please the the documentary, “Rape in the Fields”.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/rape-in-the-fields/transcript/
In the documentary, the people being exploited are farmworkers. It’s not as if they don’t have farming skills. But for various reasons (immigration status, lack of money), they aren’t allowed to farm their own land, and are instead required to get jobs farming for other people if they wish to earn money, and some of the people they work for take advantage of their vulnerabilities to get away with raping them.