tjpain

@SydSteyerhart @Lizquidity There is nothing intelligent about the current “AI.” That’s puffery so that people like Altman can feed their god complex and grift more money. Making any decision based on a belief in a rapidly approaching “singularity” is a folly of an extreme degree.

@brutal_regime Don’t just sprint quote him! I reckon Carlin would have gone insane by now if he was still around

In the immortal words of the Prophet George Carlin, "They don't give a fuck about you..."

@NewProgressUSA @aldatweets Wholly manufactured bs

@aldatweets It's UBI or collapse. Civilization will either flourish or crumble, but the status quo is ending once and for all.

It's so obvious, it's hardly worth saying. But if AI really is able to displace a ton of work, that just accelerates the arrival of the socialism or barbarism fork. Biden-type regimes that try to punt the fork down the road just won't work. Things are moving *really fast*.

@AmanitaFugax “The corporations aren’t the root of your problems, blame your fellow citizen instead” Who pays you to post on here, I wonder?

This is the hard truth most people don’t want to engage with. BlackRock isn’t why you can’t find a house. It’s old busy bodies in your town obsessed with hyper local politics, convinced of their own moral superiority, killing every housing project proposed.

@AgoristN Like blaming the tooth fairy

The next collapse will be blamed on Capitalism, and it'll be a lie.

@scottsantens lol much better ways to increase the value of labor

UBI—like Social Security—isn't about creating dependency; it's about ending it. It gives people the leverage to negotiate better wages and better conditions. It turns the labor market from a coercive "choice" into an actual choice. That's the freedom we should be fighting for.

@CDMorlock @ang99030 That’s misleading as it’s a continuation of work done well before the U.S. was a global power

@ang99030 I would just describe it as American Empire expanding.

It is absolutely insane to think Israel is "calling the shots" and some kind of force beyond American dollar hegemony and is being manipulated by it. There is no Israel, it's a theme park, and it is the spearhead of rentier economy and it's ideology. Neocons control the world (who amount to Hegelian right wing Trotskyists).

@tleilax___ Lot of words to say the U.S. is shooting itself in the foot x.com/tjpain2/status…

Trump is casually proposing one of the biggest strategic own-goals imaginable: NATO more or less done, and any country that wants Persian Gulf crude can go secure it for itself. That is a spectacularly reckless thing for an American president to say. It is a half-drunken invitation to roll the clock back toward the old colonial game, where every great power armed itself around resource access and shipping lanes. The whole reason the U.S.-led order worked is that Washington took the military question off the table for its allies. Europe and East Asia could think about trade, industry, growth, supply chains, and cheap energy. They did not need to wake up every morning thinking about convoy protection, choke points, naval escorts, forward bases, and who might try to cut their oil line. That was the deal, and for all its flaws it was an unbelievably powerful one. Put that burden back on every importing state and you do not get some elegant new realism. You get the old imperial logic creeping back in. The barrel is no longer just a barrel. It comes with freight risk, insurance risk, naval risk, basing risk, and eventually war risk. The whole achievement of the postwar order was that America suppressed a lot of that rivalry by sitting on top of the system and making the security decisions for the wider alliance. The Gulf is particularly ugly terrain for this kind of thinking. The infrastructure is concentrated, the sea lanes are narrow, and much of the population depends on fragile physical systems like desalination. Once states decide energy security is too important to leave to markets, they start looking at places like this in very hard terms. Somewhere in Paris, one of the old colonial ghosts is probably already unfolding a map of the Gulf and reminiscing about protectorates in embarrassingly enthusiastic detail. History is full of great powers making exactly this kind of mistake. The cleanest analogy is Germany after Bismarck. Bismarck built a diplomatic architecture that kept Germany secure and prevented hostile coalitions from forming. Kaiser Wilhelm II inherited that system, got impatient with its constraints, started freelancing, and slowly turned a position of strength into encirclement. He did not lose Germany in one move. He set in motion a process that made Germany less secure with every passing year. There is also an interwar British echo here. Britain remained enormously important, but it no longer wanted to fully bear the burden of policing the wider order it depended on. That did not produce a neat handoff. It produced opportunism, rearmament, and eventually a much nastier bill. And if you want the broadest analogy, it is the breakdown of the old European concert system: once the central restraining architecture weakens, states go back to fleets, blocs, balancing, and military planning around economic survival. What is so deranged about this is that it weakens the U.S. first. America’s edge was never just the size of the Navy. It was that nearly every major industrial power operated inside an American security architecture. Tear that up and over time you get fewer reliable bases, fewer aligned allies, larger independent militaries, more hedging against Washington, and much more room for China and every ambitious regional power. That is how dominant positions are squandered in history: not all at once, but by dismantling the very order that made you dominant in the first place.

@ThomBrady5 Yeah? You reckon it’s been China funding the anti-nuclear green parties since the 1970s?

China is indirectly promoting environmental activists as a form of asymmetric economic warfare against the West. China can hire some Democrat activists and for a couple million can cancel the development of $50 billion infrastructure projects.

@barbarismcrit Need more decentralization

Boy it sure would be good to have an economic system that didn’t immediately plunge 30,000 people into poverty at the whims of like one or two guys!

@DylanRatigan Governments been controlled by the west for 100s of years, does make you wonder

And how are we ridding the world of the threat of the intent and purpose if the government remains the same?

@ACPMain If you asked me to choose between an Epstein Zionist and a Communist, I could not choose

Communism is a superior economic system to capitalism. That’s why the Epstein Zionist regime wants you to hate it.

@Jack_McClendon U.S. could very easily have lower prices. They aren’t caused in the U.S. by a supply shortage

The reason i think this “walk away” has to be BS is that this effectively lets Iran control the price of oil. They let enough oil flow to stave off humanitarian issues but not enough to make prices go down below a massive pain point for Trump before the midterms. The Russians want high oil prices. The Chinese care more about making Trump look weak than 6 months of $90 oil. This is a midterm shellacking waiting to happen already, ceding control of oil prices to the IRGC is unfathomable to me.

@dygytylace @ATLCWorker Blocked, shocker

@dygytylace @ATLCWorker Disingenuous to call it capitalism. And again, regardless, that doesn’t prevent a pivot. You’re just posting doomer nonsense

Just because they let us vote doesn’t mean we live in a Democracy, Republic, or even a Democratic Republic. Capitalism is not Democracy. It’s a plutocracy of a wealthy ruling elite oligarchy.

@cafreiman How are they good for the economy?

Actually, both billionaires and immigrants are good for economy. Anti-billionaire and anti-immigration beliefs tend to result from the mistaken view that there’s a fixed sum of wealth.

@phl43 It is physically painful, no almost about it

I'd like to remind everyone, because many European rightoids called the attack on Iran by the US and Israel a brilliant move when it happened and explained that the rest of us were just pussies who didn't understand Trump's genius, that if Israel and the US had not attacked Iran absolutely nothing would have happened to us. It's almost physically painful to think about the stupidity of those people.

@ear2thepavement CIA Slotkin has an agenda for sure. Motivation and execution maybe a little lacking though.

As if “making things work” has nothing at all to do with any ideological commitments, but is just a matter of waving a magic centrist wand. Slotkin’s politics are a politics of the unthinking person who merely longs to get back to brunching or watching TV.

@dygytylace @ATLCWorker Doesn’t preclude what I said, at an individual or societal level

@tjpain2 @ATLCWorker No. We live under a capitalist dystopian police state How do you not know this?

@dygytylace @ATLCWorker Always time to pivot!

@tjpain2 @ATLCWorker Yeah, Orwell really did tell us totalitarianism sucks and we let it happen while we learned it

@moneytruth_org @Handre Just can’t let anyone get more than they deserve. At the source at least.

@tjpain2 @Handre How to make something like that sustainable? We're where we are, presumably, because powerful people got their way far too easily, far too much of the time. What can realistically switch that around long-term? And the right will hate it.

Central banks are government monopolies that socialize losses while privatizing profits for their banking cartel partners. When you eliminate market competition, you eliminate market discipline. Free banking means banks compete for your deposits by offering better service, higher interest rates, and sounder monetary policy. Bad banks fail. Good banks thrive. Scotland's free banking era (1716-1845) produced zero bank failures and stable currency. The Federal Reserve cartelizes banking, bails out reckless institutions with your tax dollars, and inflates away your purchasing power to fund government spending. Competition works. Monopolies don't.