https://www.npr.org/2011/05/16/136252401/chasing-aphrodite-a...

It’s not often discussed, but much of what you can see of Greco-Roman artifacts in the permanent collections of American museums, for example, was likely to have been looted.

The conflation of puritanical objections to pornography with opposition to their regime of theft and worse is nothing other than a cynical maneuver meant to distract from the operation and consequences of their enterprise.

The worst people are the people who move to cities and try and fit in by adopting some caricature of these customs, which is often accompanied by engaging in hideous games of one-upsmanship with their fellow new arrivals.

My partner’s friend with family in China did the same thing for us. His dad was getting chemo and they had their family send a couple boxes of KN95s over to help protect him. Depressing, given how much America looks like a failed state relative to the two countries pandemic response, but good that interpersonal relationships trump all the BS “new Cold War” rhetoric.

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Butterfly-Effect-with-Jon-Ron...

Now, having wrought all that destruction, they’re returning to what? Exactly what a regulated, verified industry looks like. It’s unconscionable that we’ve built an economy that equates to “do a lot of crime until you’re a monopoly and then behave as you should have in the first place.”

[0] https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Butterfly-Effect-with-Jon-Ron...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3103718?seq=1

https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf

I’m an American and my sentiments are based on watching what this country has done to my working class friends and family. I’m glad those things don’t happen to people in Europe.

> But not everyone agrees, and in our country, you have the right to disagree and vote for who you want.

Just about every parliamentary democracy in Europe is more representative than the American system and nowhere near as corrupt.

> But don't doubt for a second how Europe got there - through colonial genocide.

Quite familiar with that history, as well as our own of chattel slavery and the genocide of indigenous people.

I agree we would’ve been better off if they had never been allowed to buy Instagram AND we had meaningful laws in place, but I don’t see how this fundamentally changes things given where we are now.

Also, that the US accepts more immigrants is not an argument for its inherent superiority, especially given how vilified and abused they've been in the past four years. All it means is that there are countries worse than the US, or that better ones have more restrictive immigration policies.

If those realities are uncomfortable for you and you want to dismiss them, that's perfectly fine, but these stories are out there in plain sight, across the US, for you to observe.

Read the news? There’s been a huge upswing in far right politics dominating democracies worldwide, post-2008. The world’s largest democracy, India, is currently controlled by an explicitly enthnonationalist party whose leader has praised Hitler. The US, Australia, Hungary, Austria, Brazil, Japan, and many others have lurched further rightward.

> Furthermore, if that is indeed the case, what makes you think that publishing platforms are the cause?

In historical terms, there is not ever a single cause, but multiple forces coalescing to push things in one direction or another. Obviously, the 2008 financial crisis and it’s impact on the world economy created a ground that was fertile for all kinds of populism. Because of their long standing alliance with Capital owners, however, the right was better positioned to make use of these technologies as they emerged. You can also read any number of stories about the role that Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube etc served in successful right wing political campaigns across the world. Google “”WhatsApp Brazil Bolsonaro” or “Trump 2016 Facebook” of you need further insight. It’s pretty much common knowledge at this point.