The US's hegemony is a result of decades of bombing, black ops, sanctions, and embargos on non-capitalist countries that refused to kneel and kiss the ring of US oligarchs...
So yeah, countries like Vietnam and China were forced to allow US capitalism in to avoid ending up like the USSR or Cuba.
If Capitalism is so great and socialism doomed to fail, why does the US continue to embargo Cuba??? Why does the US do everything it can to ensure communist countries fail?
Ehh, I don't like the tulip comparison because that situation had nothing to do with hating the working class. The AI craze can only be reasonably explained by a deep contempt and hatred for workers. The capital class is so desperate to replace us that they will jump on any opportunity to do so.
Meta and Tesla are proof that the market doesn't cull unfit businesses. If anything, the opposite is true, large companies (effective monopolies) will sell at a loss to strangle thriving smaller companies and then will buy them out and dismantle them.
Reminder that the US arguably turned Russia into what it is today. The Soviets wanted peace after ww2, but the US threw everything it had at destroying communism. Putin was a Soviet intelligence officer during the cold war and he is convinced that the US and their western allies strangled the USSR to death with economic disruptions, sanctions, and relentless disinformation. So now Russia is doing to us what we did to the USSR
If Elon had said he loved PoE2 but he sucks at it because he rarely has time to play then that would have at least aligned with his claims that he works 60 to 80 hours a week.
Elon pretending to work 80 hour weeks and also grind 16 hours a day on PoE2 was just insane. He is such an idiot
AI art is a solution searching for a problem that has never existed.
The problem has existed and it is one of the core contradictions inherent to capitalism: that the wealthy see our wages as their lost profits while in reality their profits are unpaid surplus value of our labor... There isn't a path forward with a capitalist system because the capital class will never stop trying to commodify every aspect of society and they will never stop trying to replace us with machines or cheap foreign slave labor
Yes! Make car registration pay for all roads and safe-from-incompetent-drivers lanes for bikes! Make it also pay for all the police officers who do nothing but babysit dogshit drivers all day!
How are Americans privileged? Most Americans live in poverty (pay check to pay check, struggle to afford nutritious food, struggle to afford healthcare), they don't have the freedom of walkable cities or quality public transit, they live in constant fear that they can be fired without warning or cause, etc.
Americans don't even have a democracy or the freedom to unionize (without being fired and blacklisted). All we had was cheap consumer junk and nice national parks, but Trump is ruining both
Also, demand for cars can't drop because Americans don't have basic freedoms like access to quality public transit, walkable cities, or infrastructure to protect bikes from car drivers who watch movies on their phones while they drive
No one on earth can convince me a $60 pair of jeans is worth $60.
$60 has the same buying power thar $30 did just 15 years ago so it might be more helpful to think in living wage hours (where 50 hours of work pays for rent).
In 2025 average rent is $1650. So a living wage after taxes would be $33. In 2010 it was $890 which means a living wage was $17.
The debt issue is greatly over exaggerated. The US as a whole owns over 300 trillion in assets and trillions more in untouched resources. The US isn't broke and it isn't poor. It only feels poor because
our capitalist system is nearly the worst possible system for distributing resources where they actually need to go and
Capitalists use their resources to corrupt and bend our government to their will which results in car centric urban sprawl that is 5x less resource efficient.
For example, if we built public transit and walkable cities we could make transit completely free and it would cost far less than subsidizing car dependency. But we can't do that nation wide because it would devalue the car industry, the asphalt industry, rubber industry, and the oil industry. Under capitalism, the profits of the 0.1% always take priority over what benefits the 99%
Liberals are also to blame for gaslighting and selling workers out to the capital class for 50+ years. The last Democrat President that actually fought for the proletariat was FDR with his New Deal programs.
Yes, liberals were less evil than Republicans, but when Obama tried to give us universal healthcare they stabbed him in the back and when Bernie set multiple grassroot funding records, they conspired against him and stabbed the entire nation in the back. So if we factor in the opportunities for real leftist leadership that liberals stole from us than that opportunity cost is nearly as damaging as what Republicans are doing.