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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Hamas Says

    Always telling when they refuse to point to the leadership they are ostensibly dealing with in between rounds of mass extermination.

    Netanyahu has made it a national policy of targeting all former members of the Palestinian government, both in Gaza and the West Bank. His IDF kills militants and diplomats alike. They find family members and murder them, too. They gun down whole neighborhoods on the suspicion a Hamas insurgent might be inside. They fill their prisons with suspects and torture Gazans to death, extracting a few confessions out along the way. Then they kick off wars with neighboring Lebanon and Syria, they bomb their ostensible allies in Jordan and Egypt, and they even send bombers deep into Iran.

    Hell, they are shooting their own Oct 7th hostages. Who is left to sign a “surrender” agreement on these terms? Anyone waving a white flag is bombed into the pavement.

    Might as well ask for Anne Frank’s surrender as anyone in Gaza.


  • you just really want me to be racist

    I don’t think you’re racist. I think you’re clinging to this idea of the Transatlantic slave trade as some kind of necessary evil.

    It wouldn’t have gotten as popular in the USA and Europe if all the early blues and jazz musicians were in Africa.

    Cultural traditions have cross-pollunated without mass migrations on plenty of prior occasions. The Silk Road didn’t need to move legions of displaced people in order to bring food, clothing, and music into the Mediterranean. Neither did Dutch traders need to flood into Japan in order to convey their art and technology.

    The idea that you need a mass resettlement in order to mix musical traditions doesn’t bare out in practice.



  • there’s little chance that immigration wouldn’t have been involved somehow in your scenario(s)

    Immigrants approaching the US from a position of common interest, a la French foreign investors or Chinese manufacturing interests or Saudi oil companies. You won’t just have people crossing the Atlantic to (be made to) make music, you’d have them coming over to distribute it under home-grown record labels and on contractual terms that favored their domestic interests.

    They might have invented interesting musical genres, but I really doubt any of them would have invented something that closely resembles 1950s-1960s era black music.

    Maybe they’d have made something just as compelling, but different. Maybe they’d have made something better. It’s very hard to say. But the claim that you have to whip people and chain them up to synthesize European folk melodies with African base rhythms seems at once absurd and sadistic.

    If music history has proven anything, it is that great art flourishes when people have more leisure and more material resources. The Blues and Jazz traditions that eventually gave birth to modern Rock were the consequence of a rapidly expanding middle class. And that came out of unionization, urbanization, the modern entertainment industry, and the eight-hour work day.

    Absent prior centuries of pre-industrial slavery and emiseration, we may have achieved this musical tradition sooner and developed it more fully, before the 21st century flattened and assembly-lined its production.


  • I don’t think that logically follows.

    Music genres that came out of poor black sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta could have just as easily come from middle class black manufacturing workers in Congo or Nigeria, if the continent had been integrated with the industrial west back in the 19th century rather than raided and plundered for 400 years.

    Hell, maybe it would have come from middle class American Natives in the Mississippi Delta. Or Chinese rice farmers in a country not ravaged by opium. Or Iranians not ground under by the Shah’s dictatorship. Or Austro-Hungarians who weren’t cannibalized to fight the Napoleonic Wars or the 30 Years War that caused the Caucasian Exodus across the Atlantic.

    The Peace Dividend reaped across the Gulf Coast and the Mountain West that gave us modern western music could have been collected anywhere.


  • if people stop flying they will go out of business

    They won’t. That’s the rub. We have played this game over the decades. Whenever the industry is on the verge of bankruptcy, the feds bail them out. When the profits are flowing, the executives/shareholders are free to cash out without concern for the future of the company, and the people who need to travel are never given any kind of alternative even as the process of flying becomes more expensive and emisserating.

    It’s not that complicated.

    The central arterial system for civilian and commercial rapid mass transit is enormously complicated. Just shouting “Don’t use planes!” doesn’t address logistical alternatives.

    There is no “floor” to air travel

    There is. I just linked to it. We had empty planes flying because airlines were not contractually permitted to run fewer flights without having their routes monopolized by their competitors.

    Some of the most powerful and influential men in America fought tooth and nail to protect the railroad industry

    They didn’t. They fought to consolidate the industry decades ago. But more recently they’ve turned it over to vulture capitalists to scrap for the real estate value. One of the biggest jokes of the modern era is how Union Pacific and BNSF Railway have fumbled the bag or straight up handed it off, so a handful of senior executives could reap a few enormous windfalls.

    market forces (and, yes, to a lesser extent government policy, but mainly just people buying cars) eventually led to the near-collapse of the industry

    Freight rail has never been more profitable, in large part because the number of routes and the regulations on transport have hit rock bottom. Firms are charging record prices, paying minimal labor costs, deferring maintenance, flagrantly ignoring the law, and absolutely cleaning up in the free market.

    They’re eating their own seed corn. And in the end, the system will fail. But when you’re an executive making tens of millions in compensation, with an eye towards retirement in years rather than decades, it’s Not Your Problem.

    A knock-on consequence of this management style has been to hold up passenger rail (specifically, Amtrak, a federally owned company also plagued with underinvestment and technical debt), as points at which freight and passenger cars share lines are choked with traffic such that passengers can’t arrive in anything resembling a timely manner. THIS IS NOT AN ACCIDENT.

    Corporations can resist change but that doesn’t mean they are always successful.

    Civilians boxed into a failed mass transit system who are told “Just stop using the system” are not being provided with functional alternatives or support to leverage those alternatives.


  • That’s a bit of a gimmick related to airlines betting (correctly) that flight demand would rebound after covid ended and wanting to keep their spot in line.

    It’s an illustration of a market incentive that doesn’t reflect consumer demand. It was also a prelude to a bunch of federal and state bailouts for the industry (much like after the crashes in '08 and '01), intended to keep businesses that can’t stay profitable in the black.

    If there was a true societal shift and people flew less

    The societal shift would need to be a reduced demand for travel not a reduced desire to fly on a plane. That’s what COVID created (temporarily) but it still didn’t drop plane flights to the point of consumer demand, because of these private contractual arrangements intended to keep airports profitable.

    I fucking hate flying. I know lots of other people who hate flying. It’s stressful, it’s expensive, it’s obnoxiously bureaucratic (especially as we switch to Real ID / tighten security at borders / etc). But it is also the only practical way to get between big states in less than a day.

    If you want a True Societal Shift, you need to present alternatives to air transport. HSR was supposed to be that alternative, but it never got delivered. For some mysterious reason, passenger railroad companies that had crisscrossed the country a century ago just evaporated. Cities grew increasingly hostile towards municipal bus depots and rail terminals. Highway expansion and airline construction dominated the priority of municipal and state governments.

    Also, there WERE a lot fewer flights during covid, ghost planes notwithstanding.

    There was a floor below which the number of flights could not drop due to - what are functionally - political reasons. Similarly, there were restrictions on travel that were lifted far too soon, and reignited the rapid spread of the virus, for political reasons. And there was further M&A of smaller airlines intended to monopolize the supply of travel, because finance capital demanded air travel receive priority over other civilian alternatives.

    These are not personal consumer choices. These are corporate and state policies.

    Corporations aren’t evil

    At least from the perspective of “evil” as an all-consuming selfishness that comes at the detriment of your neighbors, Corporations are explicitly designed to be evil.

    The airline industry as it exists today - a poisonous, clumsy, alarmingly fragile, wasteful, gluttonous dinosaur of a mass transit system - is the consequence of a few cartelized industrial leaders bribing and strong arming key public sector bureaucrats into subsidizing itself, as the senior executives and investors plunder the cash flow on the back end.

    Announcing that you will be bicycling from LA to NY in protest does not change any of their economic calculus.




  • They aren’t producing that meat for the fun of it

    They’re overproducing because they’re heavily subsidized and operating under a functional price floor thanks to the wholesale market and industrial application of their products.

    Grocery store ground beef is practically a waste product. Agg Business produces far more of it than they can ever hope to sell retail.

    Its still true that less meat would be produced if less people purchased it

    Less people in a single dense region, sure. If half of New York went meatless, you’d see a sharp drop in beef sales to the Five Boroughs.

    But if you distribute those 4M people across the entire Continental US, there’s no market mechanism to reduce distribution that granularly. All you’re impacting is relative expected future profit margins per venue. No single business has an incentive to reduce wholesale purchases.





  • We are heading towards a crash. We are very much already in one, and have absolutley no way out.

    I think this is what folks lose track of when they talk about “the crash”. We’re all waiting with baited breath for the financial system to topple over. But the financial system is increasingly just a dozen private equity firms bidding up one another’s baseball cards. They can’t “crash” in the traditional sense until a sufficient number of them refuse to contribute more to the pot, and so long as everyone has easy credit there’s no real reason to do that.

    Incidentally, JPow and Trump (and every Fed Chair/President going back to Bernenke/Obama) have both been militant in keeping Fed Interest Rates at historic lows going on nearly two decades.

    Literally we are living through the gilded 1920’s again but with an American Hitler.

    I mean, the parallels between Trump and Coolidge Eras are in abundance. War on Immigration. A finance/tech sector that’s eating the industrial economy. Massive spike in white nationalism paired with a full blown Red Scare. Deficit hawkery that never touches the national security state. Global ecological crises compounding into massive famines and agricultural failures.

    We are a country being lead into disaster by the least competent people imaginable.

    Part of the problem is that we’ve lost track of a consensus on what “competent” looks like. I see plenty of people (rightly) insist guys like Trump and Speaker Johnson and governors like DeSantis and Abbott are criminally incompetent. But then these same people get fully behind Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris, seemingly without recognizing that they’re pushing the backside of the same privatization / national security state coin.

    What do you do when blue state bastions like California and New Mexico are turning out Crypto Shills as quickly as any captured conservative enclave like Wyoming or South Carolina? What does competency look like in the wake of Biden’s squandered four years or Obama’s or Clinton’s corporately compromised time in office, for that matter?

    How do you talk about climate change or even scratch the surface of our US-backed genocides in Gaza and Yemen and Afghanistan or talk about housing policy or college debts or union organization when half the elected liberal contingent is just a commodity that’s traded on the stock market?

    We’re all waiting for the dream to end in a sudden shocking economic turn. I don’t know if that’s necessarily what will happen. What if we’ve just pivoted our economy towards a monetization of human suffering? What if this system is stable and enduring? There is no crash because there’s nothing left to be broken into and fleeced.