I live in Australia and it's an absolute pain in the arse to fire someone for performance issues, assuming they work at a medium or large business (e.g. of more than 20 people) and they've made it through their 3-month trial period. You have to PIP them and the process takes months.

I've known of two engineers whose managers told me they would have fired them, but higher management wouldn't let them initiate the PIP process. The one case where I worked at the company was pretty bad. We had to shuffle the individual off onto makework jobs where they couldn't do much harm.

I don't think it's fair to blame this entirely on unions when it's the result of big businesses being too scared to follow a process that was given to them by the government. Unions mostly fight real unfair dismissals and only play a minor role in creating a chilling effect. Still, in practice it's hard to fire someone.

Sure, but that would have been pointless because none of the objectives would have been achieved. All those tribesmen would now be in Iran, and the US would have abandoned the world two decades earlier.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/08/what-do-we-owe-a...

Yes, you could have nuked the whole of Afghanistan. But for what gain?

(And what loss)

Would American soldiers do so? If you think they all would, you have no understanding of history.

Substitute Vietnam then, if the point makes you feel better.

I’m sure they could have made it work given 50 or 75 years. Need a few generations that haven’t known anything else.

That's the whole point. They were willing to die for it forever and at some point we weren't anymore.

That's how war works now. It's always been true to some extent but conflict is just getting more and more asymmetrical with no obvious upper limit.

At some point the Houthi in a cave with a five hundred dollar DJI drone and rage in his heart is king in that world: the only way to lose is to care about something that hasn't already been taken from you. You'll never kill all of them. Not with a nuclear bomb.

Yeah but they're still independent.

> U.S. military power since WW2 can basically be summed up by "We can't win, but we can still kill you." If you end up dead, your side may win, but that's cold comfort (literally) for you.

Some of them, yes. But even for those who do die: haven't you heard "give me liberty or give me death"? Many people do feel this way.

> Also, the huge irony of the Vietnam war is that by 1989, 15 years after the North Vietnamese "won", Vietnam was one of the most intensely capitalist countries on Earth.

Yet where is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie? Why do Vietnamese billionaires not run the government like they do that of America, and why does their government not have to kowtow to American business interests like Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea do? Because despite opening up their economy, their political system is far from a liberal democracy. You're making a false equivalence to try and pretend that the Vietnamese war was a no-op, that they should have just rolled over and accepted defeat like you're suggesting all the peoples of the world do.

The US wins on logistics because it has a lot of stuff already built, and anything we need we can build in the US and get it out of the US quickly.

This quickly falls apart in the US if we go civil war on each other. We are technologically fragile. If just a small portion of the people of the US went around shooting electrical distribution, fuel refining and NG compression facilities the US would have one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the last 50 years, maybe longer.

This said, there are a number of countries that would love to see us do this to each other.

At the cost of the majority in rural areas living so far below what any modern country considers poverty that it’s hard to articulate.

But sure. If you’re in Shenzhen or Shanghai it works «great». Until you step out of line ever so slightly.

Unless you're referring to Mao's rule, "Chinese socialism" is another word for "capitalism".

The US, too, has some fields of the economy that are almost entirely state owned. E.g. roads, K-12 education, public safety, transit. The existence of a few public industries does not make a country socialist.

If you look at Chinese communism on a timeline, it just appears that they are walking backwards from communism to capitalism at a very slow pace.

It seemingly works because China flipped away from communism to something more like corporatism/fascism.

It works quite well in China, assuming of course you are not so unlucky as to want to protest on Tienanmen Square. Or have useful organs someone higher up might want to harvest. Or are an Uygur. Or a Tibetan. Or live in a place downstream of a large dam. Or want to express an opinion.

Oh, and you know how Nazi Germany was the first time that Nazism was tried as well? It also succeeded in some ways, and failed in others. So I guess we should excuse that as well, then?

How else would you expect someone equipped only from today to recognize the pursuit of rhetoric?

It says that WWII happened in someone else's front yard.

I still question your claims of cause and effect here. The US abandoned this well before the USSR had fallen, and the reason the rest of Europe followed suit was not the fall of the USSR, but merely because they were blindly following the US, which they saw as a leader in this matter.

But plenty of countries did not follow down that part. There's no reason to assume this can't be stable, but you do need to limit the influence of big money and neoliberalism on your society.

> Britain at least outlawed slavery at home, but not in territories abroad

But...it didn't. I mean, not if "at home" means "throughout Britain" rather than "only in England and Wales".

And (even though I don't support him in any way), would say the election of Trump is in part due to the constant wins of the white collar work force. Most of the examples you gave of revolutions led to greater democracy and greater socialism, which benefits the blue collar, but ironically, in this case, the blue collar elected a autocratic conservative.

Again, am not a Trump supporter in anyway, but agree that when the wealthy keep getting richer while the blue-collar worker continues to struggle, this leads to discontentment and pushback.

Modern police and military gear is so advanced that revolution is unrealistic.

French revolution I can still see as consequences but Bolsheviks just took land and gave it to the new nobelity (the state).

When was the last instance of this in the last 100 years?

It's less that they "get off on" suffering (though I'm sure some do) and more that they believe some conclusions:

1. The universe simply does not permit an arrangement of humans that isn't a hierarchy of exploitation and suffering.

2. There is a "natural" hierarchy which is also a just one, where good people deserve to exploit and bad people deserve to suffer, and of course I'm not one of the bad people. ("Just-world fallacy.")

3. Anyone who says don't need to build a Torment Nexus for anyone is a sneaky liar trying to trick their way upwards into a layer in the hierarchy they don't "deserve."

So it's not as simple as sadism or greed, they'll tolerate some being stepped-on as long as they've been convinced that the "right people" doing the stepping and the bad people are getting stepped on more.

A relevant free ebook from 2006: https://theauthoritarians.org

A group of people who all agree that life is not a zero-sum game and cooperate effectively based on that premise will be very efficient, productive, and outcompete other groups.

They are also a honeypot begging to be exploited by bad actors for whom life is a zero-sum game. Once a critical mass of those asshats show up, all of the trust that led to the greater efficiency and productivity breaks down.

Greater trust between good actors is efficient but opens the door to free riders. Lower trust is inefficient but handles bad actors. I think basically all of human history is a meandering line around this unstable equilibrium of trust.

What society or culture survived by taking the high road? I'm reminded of Princess Leia's quote: No! Alderaan is peaceful, we have no weapons.

I take it you're referring to the same guy who, after taking his money, wrote that feminism is a "social disease" and that privilege is a "made up metric"? That guy?

The "pretty much" disclaimer in their comment covers this case. But it doesn't dispute their idea that most billionaires reached that level of wealth by exploiting others

"old money" tended to come with the assumption that you'd operate with a bit of noblesse oblige.

> That's probably why "old money" doesn't like "new money". New money is crass, loud, and obnoxious. Old money knows that it's best to keep to the shadows, at least until one of their idiot kids ruins it.

I suspect that’s why I’ve seen more serious monarchists than I ever have before.

> if people like Musk or Bezos suddenly popped out of existence; their lives simply don't impact mine. If anything, their existence serves as an inspiration for others to try for big dreams. Many of those will fail, some will succeed marginally, and a very small number will join the ranks of the ultra-rich - because they managed to provide a service that millions of people were willing to give them money.

Sure, you're not indoctrinated. Keep telling yourself that.

> The connection is trivial: you are upsetting an existing power system, temporarily removing all checks and balances. The new power system gets established by the aggressors, and they have absolutely no reason to hold back. At that point, human nature will simply take over.

Sounds like an argument against radical societal upheaval, rather than argument against any particular social or economic order. I think it's a good argument, but attacking alternatives to our current order with that argument begs the question: can we not have incremental change towards another order?

> you are upsetting an existing power system

That has nothing to do with communism specifically, so isn't a very strong starting point for your argument. You're essentially saying that no significantly different system can stably replace the current system, which is of course an ahistorical claim.

> each time the outcome was the same.

What about modern China? It supports over 4x the population of the US. The US is currently falling apart politically and economically as it is, so whether its current system can scale to the level of China's is an open question, to which the answer is "almost certainly not." Is American-style capitalism only suited for smaller countries, then?

You're cherry-picking of facts to focus on and facts to ignore. You have a conclusion that you believe in as a fact, which forces you to carefully choose what you allow to enter your thinking on the subject.

I'm not actually saying that communism is the solution. But I am saying that your argument is not a good one against it.

I'm curious, what's your opinion on Nestle?

Plenty of people have been murdered to defend capitalism. After the fall of the Paris commune, 30000 people were butchered in the streets. Millions of people were murdered for being communist or even just belonging to a union in Indonesia.

Not to mention the fact that the 100 million figures includes Wehrmacht soldiers or terminated fetuses as "victims" of Communism to inflate its numbers.

If you really think that there simply aren't enough resources for everyone, that makes the gluttony of the wealthy so much worse.

> There absolutely is a difference between people that die because we, as a species, cannot afford to spend the combined sum of all of our productivity on health care (which means that you will have to tell some people "no", even though they will die as a result of that), and a tyrannical dictator specifically ordering the death of people because they are a political threat to him.

I remember the howls of 'Death Panels' when Hillary Clinton brought forth a single payer universal healthcare back in 1995 as first lady.

I also remember the counter republican / Heritage foundation's plan of a health marketplace. Perhaps you heard of Romney are or ObamaCare? Same plan.

And about death panels? Initially it is a discussion of rationing a limited resource. But the death panels we have now are purely based upon greed of the insurance companies. Delay, Deny, Defend. That depose wasn't so much a bad idea, if we look at human suffering/death as a loss of GDP.

These deaths due to delaying and denying are capitalist deaths.

> Maybe you feel that a pill that costs a few bucks to produce should be sold for that same price. In that case I'd like to remind you that in this case, a private company spent BILLIONS on medical research, without knowing if any of it would ever pay off. If you just take their one succesful product and distribute it for free, they won't bother trying again.

First, most new drugs come out of the public higher education in the form of studies and papers. And Reagan changed the rules allowing universities to make bank on the backs of students.

Since they were publicly funded, they should be owned by the public.

But they're not. The rights get bought by a monopoly maker, who gets nearly 2 decades of protection. Who cares if those drugs could save 5 million per year if reasonably priced. Monopoly control gets monopoly pricing.

Now specifically Solvaldi.. It costs $1000 a pill, once a day for 12 weeks. $84k. Insurance won't pay for this cure, since treatments are cheaper. However it costs $300 to manufacture with chemical supplies. We could save 5 million people a year here, with easy and cheap access to cures. We, as a society, do not value life. We value 'how much I can extract from your life'.

Four Thieves Vinegar Collective talks about this on their videos https://kolektiva.media/w/6iqzQtGqGSKbeFndBkEcm7

> How many great medicins came out of communist countries?

Playing GOTCHA games with 'name something or you're invalid' is boring, and only shows not knowing some name on demand. And that's also being completely ignorant of the propaganda here in the USA.

But one wide area the USSR invested in is macrophage research, as a whole class of drugs. And that's not 1 drug, but a whole class.

But seriously, how many needless deaths are caused by capitalism? And yes, I'm looking at: lack of housing (homelessness), overpriced medicine, overpriced doctors, hyperprocessed and/or food that would not be legal elsewhere, terrible products that create obscene trash, extreme consumerism leading to unmitigated climate devastation.

But hey, a billionaire got another 10 million in the time it took to write my post.

Please search for "food deserts"

because as we know, people are not influenced by society at all. Every man is an island. Marketing doesn't work. Lobbying doesn't work. Manipulation doesn't work. Nobody gets radicalised.

See also “information desert” and ask yourself why a survival-oriented species might behave in this fashion.

Or don’t, it’s why they do.