You're right.
I checked the dictionary definitions and the words have indeed a somewhat different meaning than I thought, including in the detail that Nepotism is familiy and friends whilst Cronyism is only friends.
So thanks for that correction!
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Indeed.
60 years ago we were supposed to having to work very little by now thanks to automation, then automation came and instead of the productivity gains of it ending up spread across society, what happenned instead was that the extra productivity went just pushed up dividend and CxO pay higher and due to the reduced need for workers due to automation the purchasing power of salaries actually went down (for example, in the US the percentage of corporate revenues that went to pay salaries fell from 23% in the 70s down to 7% by 2014).
Expecting that, under the exact system that's been moving us more and more towards Dystopia with each wave of automation, AI would somehow end up making things better for most people rather than better just for the Owner Class and worse for part or most of the rest, is pretty ill-informed and naive.
What the US politicians think, decide and legislate is irrelevant: the US actually targetting EU nations would directly yield counter-sanctions from the whole of the EU because that's a core part of the EU Membership Treaties (so, not the kind of thing that can just be blocked by a veto from a US-friendly EU member nation), and those would seriously impact the US Economy, not to mention the indirect impact on the US' broader geostrategical influence from treating the EU as an adversary.
For the EU it would be something like Brexit - even if the EU loses from a hard posture, it cannot afford to let the other side get away with it without very painful consequences because that would result in them doing even worst things later and would incentivise others to do the same - only in this case the EU would suffer way less from playing hardball with the US than it did from doing it with Brexiting Britain.
For the US it would basically be comitting Trade Suicide at the feet of China.
If the US Congress and Senate are too stupid and actually pass those laws and POTOS too is too stupid and actually uses it, all without the companies that are going to get screwed the most by counter-sanctions (mainly Tech) lobbying that proposal away into nothing, thats a lot more a US problem than an EU problem and there is no way at all that the upsides are close to even just begin to justify the downsides.
(Sure it would hurt the EU, just a lot less than doing nothing about it would).
Personally I would love for the US policians to try it and find out.
Smorgasbord all day every day would be Tortute!
I think you mean Cronyism, which unlike Nepotism isn't limited to family.
Looking at my own country, which has a massive culture of Cronyism, some years ago I concluded that Corruption is really just Cronyism in exchange for money hence why it's so easy for it to develop in countries with a culture of friends using the power and money entrusted to them by others to help their friends.
It seems to me this also applies to the US were "campaign contributions" facilitate the buying of active politicians in a way which is not legally treated as Corruption, just things like the "speech circuit", non-executive board memberships, funding of foundations and gold-plated "consultancy" are used to reward "friendly" policians after they retire from Politics in ways that completely obscure any Qui Pro Quo involved hence do get treated as Corruption even when they most definitelly are that (i.e. when a politician has explicitly agreed to use their power in a specific way when given a overt promise of such a reward at a later stage).
Want to see who politicians benefit, start by looking at whose parties they go to and which people do they socialize with.
The problem in the European Union is called Germany, whose politicians seem to have never leaved the whole "We support any Holocaust as long as it's a ´good´ race ´solving the problem' of a ´bad´ race" mindset.
If the US tries to hit any EU country with any commercial sanction the EU as whole is Treaty bound to impose counter-sanctions on the US and America doesn't really want to see its access to a market of 470 million people cut and its tacit support from the biggest trade block around to it's Guerrilla Trade War with China to dissapear completelly.
One of the main reason why the EU exists (the other being to incentivise Peace in Europe through tight trade ties) is exactly because whilst large nations like the US can indeed bully small and even medium sized nations via trade and sanctions, they can't bully a tightly integrated association of nations adding up to a larger Economy with a larger Market than the US.
The US trying that shit on EU nations would just result in a Trade War and a significant acceleration of the current post-Imperial decay stage the US is in.
Finger wagging intensifies
So the "I'm alright Jack" posture.
It's a selfish and immoral posture already when one takes it at the voting booth to chose a candidate that will personally benefit them whilst screwing most people, but it's especially low when one for personal upside maximization is knowingly part of the machinery that swindles people into supporting a Genocide well on it's way to Holocaust.
Since Psychopathy and Sociopathy are ranges rather than absolutes, it's estimated that about 4% of humans are Psychopaths or Sociopaths and we're talking about the what's basically the handful of people in a universe of over 300 million who seeks and achieves positions at the top of the Power Duopoly in the US in a domain well know for it's cut-throating and backstabbing, I would say that the odds heavily favour the explanation of them being very high on the Sociopath (or Psychopath) - so called "well adjusted Sociopaths" - spectrum than them being normal people who are "relaxed about personally enabling the murder of tens of thousands of children".
The image of a Sociopaths or Psychopath who actively seeks to inflict horrible pain on others for their own pleasure is incredibly atypical and Hollywoodesque - being high on those scales just means having no empathy for others, including their suffering or joy, and the result is that a Sociopath or Psychopath simply does that which they think is better for themselves and they can get away with (they care about the consequences for themselves, not for others), with absolutely no consideration for how that makes others feel, hence harm or even death of others is fine since that has the same emotional resonance for them as breaking an inanimate object.
Fossil Fuels are decreasing as a percentage of the overall energy supply that powers so much of the Economy and Industrial and Agricultural production in Western Economies are a small fraction of the total (less than 20% together).
Nowadays it's not about the West making things with pillaged resources from the Global South, it's all Financialization and the Ultra-Wealthy extracting the last leftover wealth from everybody, everything and everywhere like the endgame in a Monopoly Game.
Oil by itself is not enough justification, IMHO.
Besides, Israel is being the very opposite of a force for stability in the region, which isn't going to help the Petro-Dollar.
(If you go check the Gold markets, it's never been this high, something which possibly signals increasing distrust in the US Dollar and other main currencies)
The Economy is not booming, it's only the prices of Assets such as houses that are in a bubble.
Last time around the "wealth" (even if illusory) was spreading a lot more and causing all sorts of things to grow by feeding consumption, as well as a general feeling of prosperity (until it turned out it was illusory and the whole castle of cards fell) whilst this time around it's pretty much only large asset owners who are actually gaining from this whilst the rest just increasingly feel poorer and more treading water ever harder merelly not to drown.
It's a different Economic climate and even a different feeling for most people, even if both periods share the house price bubble.
PS: And, by the way, this is not just in the US.
The only way to equate Israel with the Jewish Religion is to be a Racist - it requires one to believe that "Jews are all the same" hence they are all represented by Israel. This is expecially Racist given that there are many Jews who are openly critical of Israel, its actions and even its existence - it doesn't get much more obviously Racist than when non-Jews claim to know better about Jewishness and who represents All Jews than actual people who are Jews.
This is how you spot the Racists: not just the obvious ones but also the kind that playacts as anti-Racist whilst in practice, as I pointed out, holding extremelly prejudiced views and in practice viewing, judging and treating other human beings as "etnic group members" rather than people - they'll tell you all about what people of other etnicities are like and how you should support or not people based entirelly on the ethnicity they were born into.
In my personal experience Britain is riddled with Racist thinking, but a lot of it was disguised as "support of 'good' races" (only they carefully avoided the word "race"), except when it came to Muslims since discrimination against them has long been treated as acceptable.
You can chose to dip you hands in the blood of thousands of dead children by activelly rewarding a candidate who is enabling their murder, or you can chose not to.
Given the lack of Democracy in the American system, that means that you either participate hence end up with blood on your hands no matter which of the two electable candidates you vote for or do not participate.The choices of others who do participate are irrelevant for that decision.
Justifying your choice of supporting a enabler of child murder candidate because others might chose the candidate you dislike the most and hence makes you fear for yourself, is not the high moral standpoint you seem to think it is.
Absolutely, it's a though choice. However this preaching you and those like you are doing about "Not voting is a vote for Trump" is not done from the top of a Moral High Horse, it's from the top of the pile of the bloody bones of tens of thousands of murdered children which is still growing, and driven by at best selfish self-preservation not any kind of selfless moral principle.
So spare us the bullshit.
The slaughter of innocent children makes no difference to sociopaths.
If there is one thing this Genocide on its way to Holocaust has shown us. is that the Democrat Party leadership are without a doubt sociopaths of the worst kind: a normal person with the power they have would not be actively helping it by sending the Neue Nazis the very weapons which they know are being used to massacre children.
There really is no other possible conclusion: no normal person would go "yeah but our campaign contributions from the AIPAC are more important than tens of thousands of dead children" or "yeah but the profits of the MIC shareholders are more important than tens of thousands of dead children".
So a re-run of 2006-2007, but this time around there wasn't even an actual boom preceeding this.
Logically one must conclude that it's not at all about saving lives.
I read it as being particularly good at it, since everybody does indeed do pattern matching and can spot details.
That format of presentation - especially when the choice was clearly made to go for more points rather than more depth per point - is unsuitable for precise, detailed explanations, so expecting otherwise isn't exactly logic.
As somebody who, judging by everything else in there matches that particular part of the spectrum (though never formally diagnosed) I've always had an eye for details and am big at figuring things out via pattern matching (I.e. notice that certain combinations of things tend to go along with certain other combinations of things or outcomes) which is also what powers the "skip" thinking (you can jump directly to a list of possibly explanations by recognizing that it shares a pattern with something else whose explanation I already have and then work backwards from there to confirm if indeed one of those possible explanations is the correct one).
I've studied and worked in highly intellectual areas (Science and Technology) and have seldom come across others with a similar style of thinking so to me it makes sense that in that graph those things are there in the sense of more/better than most.
I come from a country - Portugal - which before 1974 had a Fascist Dictatorship and during that time there were 9 very rich families which were fully entwined with the dictatorship and supportive of it and pretty much the rest of the country was crushingly poor (and this is no exageration: at one point this European country was the recipient of Food Aid from countries such as The Netherlands, which, by the way, I know from family members, amongst other things sent cheese, so Dank u wel Nederland!).
The "ladies" of those very rich families used to boast of how much Charity they did.
Rights, consecrated in Law (ideally a Constitution) are for everybody and cannot be arbitrarily denied or withdrawn because, say, the person has not shown enough thankfulness.
Charity is entirely arbitrary, given arbitrarily in arbitrary amounts and taken away arbitrarily for any reason, even maliciously to inflict suffering on the needy.
The function of Charity is not to help, is to salve the consciences and polish the social image of the very people who with their actions the other 99% of the time cause the very suffering they so loudly and overtly claim the be reducing with their "charity"
Two points:
- You don't measure politicians on their words, you measure them on their actions. When it comes to actual results, the style of salemanship makes no difference whatsoever: only an idiot would trully believe the used cars saleswoman with the smooth talk, half truths and vague statements of intentions that keeps implying she's really committed to getting you a trouble free car whilst always selling you a lemon is any better than the salesman with the brutish and simpleton sales talk that keeps telling you you'll get "the greatest car on Earth" and sells you a lemon. They're both shit, just with a different method of scamming people. Kamala ain't going to do anything but keep on supporting the Genocide all the way to a Holocaust because she hasn't taken even the slightest step in the direction of trying to stop it, quite the contrary
- The only way to get Democrat politicians to not freely act on their sociopath impulses - and anybody who unwaveringly supports the mass killing of people, including tens of thousands of children due to their race is, no matter what excuse they use, with total and absolute certainty a sociopath - is for them to be terrified that their careers will crash and burn. That means losing not just the Presidential election but also massive numbers of seats in Congress and even local elections. A sociopath's only motivation is they themselves and nobody else, so when it comes to politicians that's keeping their career going until they've made millions from selling their services as yielders of the powers entrusted to them by voters to the highest bidder. So people organising locally and for example plastering posters with pictures of dead children and the words "X gets paid to support this" all over the place in the districts of every APAIC supported Congress candidate to FUCK THEM UP for talking money to enable the mass murder of children can, if it succeeds, push the Democrats away fro supporting Fascism and other such sociopath choices, whilst the veritable reek of fear from the OP and others like him posting "We must vote for the smooth talking lovers of Genocidal ethno-Facism abroad so that the overt Fascist simpleton here doesn't win" memes just tells the sociopaths in the Democrat party that there are not limits to what they can get away with and will push the Democrat Party even more to the Right with Fascism In American the ultimate result either way. Sure, Trump not winning now is less bad than him winning, but if that happens in such a way that the Democrat politicians get convinced that there are no limits to the how depraved and sociopath they can be - and sending weapons to people murdering tens of thousands of children because of their race is about as depraved as it gets short of them murdering children themselves with their bare hands - and get away with it, all you did was make sure your Future is Fascism, the only difference being When rather than If.
Putin isn't even able to overrun Ukraine who have been getting mostly equipment from 1 generation ago, mostly late and with a ton of limitations imposed on its use, and has a much smaller population than Europe (and a tiny Economy next to it), and you think he would be able to overrun Europe?
Poland alone would probably suffice to stop him.