General CE Chat

oneniltothearsenal said:

An example of what I mean is this:

1. Bernie voted against the 1991 Iraq War.
2. Gore vote for the 1991 Iraq War.
3. Therefore I believe Bernie has a lower percentage chance of going to war in 2000 had he been president than Gore.

That's what I mean by percentage not guesstimating some precise percent number

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Its like saying in football "if we played that match 100 times, I think X side would have won 75 of those".

That's different than saying "we can safely deduce X would have happened" which impliess a 100 out of 100.

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Synco said:

Bottom line for me: You can't copy the basic political forms and practises of the established order, let alone the variants specific to the right, and fill them with a radically different social content. These forms aren't neutral vessels, compatible with any political purpose, they have their own intrinsic practical logic, and they will transform those who try to instrumentalize them, not vice versa. The ever-repeating tragedy of the reformist (and, in different ways, larger parts of the historical revolutionary) left.

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I can't deny it: it seems clear, as Jeet Heer noted last evening, that Twitter has managed to destroy one of the world's most prestigious platforms of elite opinion. Teens with anime avis and display names like Dark Joker 5.0 have accomplished what the complete works of Noam Chomsky never could: they finally discredited the New York Times op-ed page.

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Chairman Woodie said:

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I don't imagine too many Zimbabweans will miss Mugabe.

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Duh! It's not like Mugabe was a despot or nothing ...

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psychdelicblues said:

It's a parody account.

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van der star said:

Yay, science!

CRISPR used to fight HIV.

https://www.iflscience.com/health-a...for-the-first-time-in-the-quest-to-fight-hiv/

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The process was inspired by the Berlin patient, who in 2008 became the first person to be cured of HIV when doctors took him off antiretroviral drugs and administered blood cells from a bone marrow donor with a naturally occurring mutation that damages the CCR5 gene. The 41-year-old man was cured of his leukemia and his HIV.

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PedroMendez said:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/

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oneniltothearsenal said:

If you believe everything that is not "public ownership of all means of production" = "capitalism" then that just illustrates my point on how debating with those words is just useless because you clearly have your own personal definition of "capitalism" that differs from anyone else's I've heard.

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oneniltothearsenal said:

EDIT: actually you sound a lot like Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man on this issue now that I think about it.

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oneniltothearsenal said:

So its pointless to debate it.

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Synco said:

@oneniltothearsenal
Man, you make it really hard for someone to back off

You've certainly heard of Marx & Engels. I'm sure there are other theories too.

I also didn't say everything that is not "public ownership of all means of production" = capitalism. That would be historically untrue, of course. I said: everything that is not "public ownership of all means of production"=/= socialism. I don't think that definition is as uncommon as you seem to do.

From a quick glance on wiki, certainly not. Like, at all. Just reinforces my impression there'd be a lot to clarify to find common ground for a discussion.

I don't think so, actually. Just very time consuming.

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oneniltothearsenal said:

Well its interesting you never addressed the main issue

Profit-seeking is really the concept that needs to be debated in policy circles bereft of the loaded and charged words that cause more misunderstanding than mutually beneficial discussion.

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Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere.

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Chairman Woodie said:

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Watched a documentary on Richard Huckle a couple of weeks ago. See below.

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InfiniteBoredom said:

I think you got the wrong idea about what I meant. FDR was obviously much more combative and no one can deny where his allegiance were, but his approach at the very least at the beginning of his presidency was conciliatory towards the oligarchic interests, much the same way Obama did, it wasn’t all fire and fury and getting the working class behind a movement, Al Smith once said you can’t get FDR to commit to any position. It’s only when he becomes increasingly frustrated that they were trying to undermine him every step of the way even with the willingness to play ball that he started trying to pack the court and become decidedly populist in his rhetorics.

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Carolina Red said:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/01/asia/indonesia-adultery-caning-scli-intl/index.html

(CNN)An Indonesian man has been publicly flogged for adultery, under a draconian law he helped create.

Mukhlis, a member of the Aceh Ulema Council (MPU) in the deeply conservative Aceh province of Indonesia, received 28 lashes in front of a crowd on Thursday after being caught having an affair with a married woman.

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The idea was relatively simple — what if offices, but disruption? Essentially the company bought up some of the most expensive real estate in the world — in some of the most expensive cities in the world — and gave them a nice millennial once-over. You know the look: mid-century modern furniture, clean lines, blinding white natural night, hardwood, open floor plan, succulents, kombucha, revolting neoliberal work ethic sloganeering like “Rise and Grind” and “Do What You Love” everywhere. Then they spent a ton on marketing, believing they were destined to rake in a rentier’s ransom from freelancers, gig workers, and “small business owners” with a keen eye for start-ups — hey, why not build your tenuous bubble on a whole bunch of other smaller, even more tenuous bubbles?

As an added bonus, WeWork tracked their tenant’s data (the profit potential of which isn’t terribly clear), allowing them the dubious self-identification of “tech company,” despite the entire thing hinging on a massively speculative and costly real estate venture.

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SoftBank’s initial investments totaling $8 billion in 2017 sent WeWork global, and another $2 billion in 2019 doubled their valuation to $47 billion, a number that the absolute bare minimum of bar-napkin math would have exposed as wildly overvalued. For their part, Financial Times had been sounding the alarm well before they hit $47 billion, but by August of this year, even Forbes was declaring WeWork “the Most Ridiculous IPO of 2019.”

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Neumann became famous for demanding his employees do shots of $140-a-bottle Don Julio tequila with him during interviews, staff meetings, and at the mandatory, hours-long team-building exercises (called, of course, “Thank God It’s Monday”). He boasted that he worked twenty-hour days and hid employees during public appearances so the company looked “leaner.” He would insist he needed no support staff for overseas work, change his mind, then fly out assistants to London for six hours of work before sending them right back to New York.

The cult of WeWork was an intimate one; at one point, Neumann formally employed at least twenty friends and family members and surrounded himself with many others in less formal capacities. His father sat in on meetings, despite not working at the company. His sister wasn’t a WeWork employee either, but she did the same, and reportedly ordered WeWork staff to watch her young children, who Neumann preemptively secured work emails for. His brother-in-law was appointed head of WeWork’s gym venture. His experience? Fifteen years as a professional soccer player. Neumann envisioned a WeBank, a sea-steading WeWork called WeSail, and insisted that “WeWork Mars is in our pipeline,” (though by his own account, he failed to woo fellow intergalactic space god Elon Musk into a business partnership).

Neumann’s wife, Rebekah Paltrow Neumann (cousin of Gwyneth), was given the title of his “strategic thought partner.” Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner came to her birthday in Italy. Rebekah opened a private, “conscious, entrepreneurial” elementary school in New York, with tuition ranging from $22,000 to $42,000 a year, hoping to attract parents with this terrifyingly messianic mission statement: “We are committed to elevating the collective consciousness of the world by expanding happiness and unleashing every human’s superpowers.” They are closing after their first year.

To say that Neumann has a god complex is almost underselling him; this is a man who was so sure of his genetic dynasty that he believed his “generationally controlled” company would pass down that absolute control to his descendants in perpetuity. In a leaked video at an “all-hands” staff meeting, he frothed in his megalomania:

It’s important that one day, maybe in one hundred years, maybe in three hundred years, a great-great-granddaughter of mine will walk into that room and say, “Hey, you don’t know me; I actually control the place.”

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Only on his way out did Neumann finally get nailed, but even then, only on one of his smaller grifts; in 2019, he trademarked the word “we,” changed the name of the company to “The We Company,” and then sold the rights to use it back to his own company for $5.9 million. His punishment? After some understandable ethical scrutiny, Neumann gave the money back. Three weeks later, the board voted on his position of CEO; along with others, Neumann voted himself out, scot-free.

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It’s true that there are no clean hands in a dirty world, but WeWork has been exceptionally dirty from the get-go, even for tech, even for real estate. It’s an American company, but it was funded primarily by SoftBank’s $97 billion “Vision Fund,” the largest private pool of money ever raised, nearly half of which was bankrolled by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.

SoftBank famously secured this cash after its CEO, Masayoshi Son, had a quiet little meeting with the crown prince to let him know that the recent dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi hadn’t shaken his faith in the royal family. And, of course, Neumann strove to maintain that relationship.

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