Bob Sykes: The US no longer has either the military or industrial base (and maybe not the quality of people) needed to control the Strait of Hormuz. The situation in the Gulf has changed radically since we invaded Iraq. Iran is much stronger in every way, especially in asabiyyah. Iran covers some 600,000 sq mi, and has a population of 92 M. By comparison, Western Europe. The EU and UK combined have a population of 430 M and an area of 1.2 M sq mi. Iran has a modern industrial economy, and is capable of...
Isegoria: You might also consider Thiel’s optimistic thought experiment.
Jim: Just think of it: * Billionaire * Homosexual * Recipient of CIA investment funds * Gives talks at CIA events * Capitalist * Most famously associated with PayPal, the definitive fintech company * Now famously associated with Palantir, the definitive private surveillance company * One of the earliest investors in FaceBook, formerly LifeLog * Funded the foremost rocket company, SpaceX * Funded one of the leading arms producers, Anduril * Many other things * Presumably a bunch of weird stuff that...
Jim: Thiel’s book, read adversarially, is shockingly revealing. I’ve long been intensely amused that he gets away with calling himself a libertarian.
Jim: Correction: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Isegoria: Thiel definitely warrants multiple posts. I first mentioned him as part of the PayPal mafia, back in 2007, and then as the head of Founders Fund.
Gaikokumaniakku: I only read Zero to One once, back in 2015 or so, but I should definitely give it another look. I encountered it back then as required reading for the interview process at a tech startup that ended up failing. Peter Thiel is an interesting character that could provide material for several blog posts.
Jim: Peter Thiel’s Zero to One is like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion for capitalist rent-seekers.
Bob Sykes: One of the reasons for the existence of EMT’s was the inability of medics and corpsmen from the Vietnam War to get work as nurses in hospitals and clinics. Nurses and their professional associations adamantly opposed formal recognition of the emergency skills of the men who had served in the war. Eventually EMT’s were added to fire departments as a way of letting the men use their skills, much to the benefit of everyone. The nurses’ resistance to recognizing these men was especially churlish...
Jim: Gaikokumaniakku: “Jim probably knows a lot more about capitalism than I do, and probably could teach me, but probably has better things to do with his time. If anyone wants to chime in with book recommendations, I’m all ears.” Zero to One, by Peter Thiel.
Eric Brown: Ah, no. Railroads got public land *after* building the railroad, not before. Even so, ~80% of the railroad companies got overextended and went bankrupt. Same thing happened with telegraph companies, though they didn’t get public land. There are obvious parallels with the internet and AI.
Gaikokumaniakku: “…’robber-baron capitalism’ was a rhetorical cudgel…” Consider how the USA built railroads. Self-serving crony capitalists got handouts of public land, then used that seed capital to build immense private wealth. These are not the people I point to when I want to indicate capitalism done properly. Jim probably knows a lot more about capitalism than I do, and probably could teach me, but probably has better things to do with his time. If anyone wants to chime in with book recommendations,...
Isegoria: This dynamic played out differently in the West: When Communism took over Russia and China, those were still very poor, semi-traditional societies. Plenty of semi-starved peasants around. So you could run a Leninist party just on class resentments. “Never forget class-struggle”, Mao liked to say. “Never forget you used to be a serf and you’re not one now thanks to me”, he meant. In the West, though, by 1945, when peace and order was enforced by the United States, the economy had improved to the...
Isegoria: Spandrell explained why “kulak” became a derogatory term: What did Lenin do? Exterminate the natural aristocracy of Russia, and build a ruling class with a bunch of low-status people. Workers, peasants, Jews, Latvians, Ukrainians. Lenin went out of his way to recruit everyone who had a grudge against Imperial Russian society. And it worked, brilliantly. The Bolsheviks, a small party who little popular support, won the civil war, and became the awesome Soviet Union. The early Soviet Union...
Mike in Boston: “Bioslop” is more purely derogatory, but the earlier term “Bioleninism” ; offers some insight by analogy: As Lenin and the communists rallied the downtrodden to overthrow the bourgeoisie, so bioleninism rallies those with biological or identitarian disadvantages (perceived or inherent) to Leftist causes. In a system based on ability or traditional hierarchies such as a meritocracy or most Western civilizations, these groups would be at the bottom of the ladder...
Bob Sykes: “Bioslop,” coining a new racist insult. Loving it. Congrats to Kulak. Wasn’t “kulak” itself a derogatory term under Stalin?
Bob Sykes: While both Russia and China are authoritarian (but nowhere near Stalinist or Maoist), their Elites are both more representative of their people and work more in their people’s interests than do the US, UK, or EU regimes. The late Senator Graham is a good example of just how hostile to the American people our Epstein Rulers really are.
Jim: As far as I can tell, “robber-baron capitalism” was a rhetorical cudgel used by the power center that established the Federal Reserve System, an hereditary banking oligarchy, against ordinary self-made industrial magnates.
Gaikokumaniakku: The 19th century glorified robber-baron capitalism along with other myths of individual heroes. They forgot that Newton said he was standing on the shoulders of giants — and of course they also forgot that when Newton said that, he was referencing a long string of writers who had used the phrase for hundreds of years, back to Bernard of Chartres: “We are like dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by...