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Queering Wheel
Jun 18, 2011


I AM GRANDO posted:

You know, what even is the point of cable news at a time when breaking news shows up on people’s phones and 30% of the footage on tv news is taken from phone recordings of things people were there for?

It's for old people who don't feel like spending much time figuring out how fancy new smartphones work.

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pencilhands
Aug 20, 2022

goons itt:

https://www.theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-doesnt-own-a-televisi-1819565469

koolkal
Oct 21, 2008

this thread maybe doesnt have room for 2 green xbox one avs



This article is older than some posters itt lol

Main Paineframe
Oct 27, 2010

Eiba posted:

The post I was responding to was implying that "workers" would still demand infinite growth because why wouldn't they?

My position is that there are a lot of situations where people wouldn't ask for infinite growth. Anomalously, our current economy is not one of those situations- anyone interacting with it needs infinite growth to avoid drowning, so it seems "natural" to us, but it is not natural or normal.

The idea that growth is desired is very distinct from the idea that infinite growth is desired. Of course there was a period of growth of state power that lead to the state power I'm talking about. That's kind of trivially true. I think there are examples of that kind of growth just never happening, but I think uglycat already made a very good post about hunter gatherers in this context. I'm talking about two examples of states that acted in a way that prove that it is entirely conceivable that people with power might have concerns other than growing that power.

Tokugawa Japan could easily have cleansed Hokkaido of the Ainu and built up more effective economic systems there, as they immediately did once they got the productivity bug from the West, but the Tokugawa did not pour everything into exploitation.

Likewise, the Chinese Treasure Fleets were getting tons of resources in the form of tribute, and were reasonably profitable to China.

In both cases it was decided that increasing productivity was not the most desirable course of action. Who exactly pays and who exactly profits was an issue- it might create a power base for new classes, who would have the resources to change other things and so on until things were different. And that was, by default, dangerous.

My point is not that no one sought wealth or personal advancement before capitalism, just that it was very normal for other priorities to win out sometimes.

The idea that "workers" gaining power would necessarily just want the same infinite growth that capitalists do is a profound lack of imagination and historical perspective.

I guess, rather than hashing out the historical points (see above for some outlines about what I'm trying to get at), I want to address this.

Even if people want their lives to improve, it has (rightly) not been clear that "growth" will lead to improving their lives. One form of growth is killing your neighbors and taking their stuff- Roman style. Most of Rome's contemporaries did not try to attempt that growth because they didn't think it would improve their situation. Either it was too hard to conquer their neighbors or they liked their neighbors or whatever.

You could get tribute flowing in from foreign lands, or send settlers to displace unsettled people on your frontier, but maybe you don't think that will actually improve your lot in life or the stability of your country or whatever you valued more- especially if you don't have this very abstract, inhuman notion of a rising tide lifting all ships. Not all growth is good for everyone.

I think it would be pretty uncontroversial in this forum to say that it is not necessarily a good thing every time the economic line goes up. There are definitely times when "growth" is bad, or simply not in your interest. Humans can see that easily. Investors cannot.

That's what's alien about our current adherence to eternal growth. There's no human input anymore. Monetize everything and ensure everything is fungible, and then all growth is good always- for the investor class at least. There's nothing to weigh against the need for the line to go up.

That's not always how things worked, and that's all I was trying to point out. Replacing investors with workers would open the door to fundamentally different priorities, because right now other priorities are entirely off the table.


To try and forestall some objections to this- I know there's a lot more complexity to our current economic system, to historical systems, and the rest. This is a very general attempt at justifying a very general principle- our modern assumptions are based on modern economic structures. There are a lot more possibilities out there, both in history and in a potential future.

What the conversation was about isn't growth of state power, it's economic growth. Increased productivity, increased output. More food and goods, at cheaper prices. Who doesn't want that? And how that growth is obtained depends a lot on the specific, individual circumstances a society is in.

Tokugawa Japan actually underwent substantial economic growth. They didn't directly take over all of Hokkaido, sure, but they didn't need to, and probably didn't consider it worth the substantial amount of trouble it would have posed. At the time, Japan already had plenty of land, resources, and manpower that was very poorly utilized due to (among other things) more than a century of bloody civil war and social disorder. As such, the Tokugawa shogunate could bring out great gains by just giving people a break from generations of warfare. The early Edo period saw substantial population growth, massive increases in agricultural output, and substantial urbanization. On the other hand, in the later part of the Tokugawa period, famines put a stop to population growth and destabilized a mostly-feudal society that was already struggling to cope with the rise of the commoner merchants and the decline of the various noble classes. As a result, the economy (and with it, the social system) was already starting to develop large and obvious cracks when foreign pressure came in and delivered that final series of pushes that broke the shogunate for good.

Yes, other priorities compete with economic growth. That's always been the case, and it's still the case. The same is true in capitalism today. Look at the Florida legislature trying to undermine the state's biggest tourist attraction for the sake of culture war nonsense. Look at segregationists refusing to accept the business of non-white people, even though everyone's cash is green. Look at the American media and defense industries purging a number of well-known and highly qualified figures in an anti-leftist frenzy back in the McCarthy era, without regard for the financial or economic impact.

I don't think capitalism is substantially more obsessed with "infinite growth" than previous generations are. Both in the sense that previous generations were plenty interested in economic growth, and also in the sense that people are exaggerating how obsessed capitalists actually are with growth above all else. After all, "infinite growth" is just an abstract phrase. The workers and CEOs out there aren't waking up in the morning and saying to themselves "man, I can't wait to pursue infinite growth in our society today". They're saying "man, I hope I make more money today". But the only way for everyone's income to consistently trend upward is for the economy as a whole to keep growing and never shrink. In other words, infinite growth. But when the economy isn't growing, we call that a "recession" and it usually fuckin sucks!

Kavros
May 18, 2011

sleep sleep sleep
fly fly post post
sleep sleep sleep

Eiba posted:

Tokugawa Japan is another pretty prominent example, and might be our best example of a developed feudal society that, through some geographical luck, was able to actually just do what a feudal state naturally wants to do without outside influence: just chill.

I'm entirely unsurprised that after years upon years of rampaging and conspicuously massacring people all the way across Korea in an attempt to subjugate the entire territory and culture, ending in extremely costly failure and the loss of the fleets necessary for that kind of invasion, Japan was enthusiastically going "Whew, super excited to Just Chill and only do a little brutal military conquest for a while."

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
More the problem is all the war and conquest and expansion is the only thing the history books are ever interested in writing about and generally held up as what 'Civilization' is and means.

Look at how the New Deal is basically erased from history books when the massive infrastructure and welfare projects fundamentally changed how the majority of Americans lived and what American culture and society looked like. People aren't taught about infrastructure and its importance, and now they've forgotten what it even is. Laughing at 'Chinese ghost cities' and panicking at the idea of living somewhere you don't need a car to function because it's fundamentally alien to them.

Eiba
Jul 26, 2007


Main Paineframe posted:

I don't think capitalism is substantially more obsessed with "infinite growth" than previous generations are.
Then I just fundamentally do not understand the current or past world as you do.

Something novel happened when Europeans became obsessed with productivity, enclosing the "unproductive" land that the state couldn't tax, which had been utilized by commoners to their own ends for thousands of years. That poo poo's not normal human behavior. Previous societies didn't do that for hundreds of thousands of years, while our modern society couldn't imagine doing anything else.

The need for the number to go up isn't just a Republican thing, by the way- since you bring up fringe politicians lashing out at corporations. It's an absolute core value of the Democrats as well. And honestly, with things as they are, it should be. If the number fails to go up, without a massive restructuring of our society- which I don't see happening any time soon- we'll all be hosed.

Maybe I've just given bad examples, but I really don't understand why it's so hard to understand, with any historical literacy at all, that our modern world is far more oriented to a single goal than most of human history. There's only so many ways I can say, "greed isn't new, but it didn't used to be this central to everything."

Kavros posted:

I'm entirely unsurprised that after years upon years of rampaging and conspicuously massacring people all the way across Korea in an attempt to subjugate the entire territory and culture, ending in extremely costly failure and the loss of the fleets necessary for that kind of invasion, Japan was enthusiastically going "Whew, super excited to Just Chill and only do a little brutal military conquest for a while."
I am 100% not saying a society that doesn't value infinite growth is necessarily good. Tokugawa Japan is pretty hosed up in a lot of other ways. But this is a non sequitur. The Edo period lasted for centuries. If it was in part the product of Japan failing at incredibly brutal attempts at imperialism... okay? It's still an example of many generations of humans agreeing that "growth" isn't worth it.

Maybe our current culture will discover that infinite economic growth isn't worth it after vast human tragedies make that conclusion unavoidable.

Captain Oblivious
Oct 12, 2007

I'm not like other posters

Eiba posted:

Then I just fundamentally do not understand the current or past world as you do.

Something novel happened when Europeans became obsessed with productivity, enclosing the "unproductive" land that the state couldn't tax, which had been utilized by commoners to their own ends for thousands of years. That poo poo's not normal human behavior. Previous societies didn't do that for hundreds of thousands of years, while our modern society couldn't imagine doing anything else.

The need for the number to go up isn't just a Republican thing, by the way- since you bring up fringe politicians lashing out at corporations. It's an absolute core value of the Democrats as well. And honestly, with things as they are, it should be. If the number fails to go up, without a massive restructuring of our society- which I don't see happening any time soon- we'll all be hosed.

Maybe I've just given bad examples, but I really don't understand why it's so hard to understand, with any historical literacy at all, that our modern world is far more oriented to a single goal than most of human history. There's only so many ways I can say, "greed isn't new, but it didn't used to be this central to everything."

I am 100% not saying a society that doesn't value infinite growth is necessarily good. Tokugawa Japan is pretty hosed up in a lot of other ways. But this is a non sequitur. The Edo period lasted for centuries. If it was in part the product of Japan failing at incredibly brutal attempts at imperialism... okay? It's still an example of many generations of humans agreeing that "growth" isn't worth it.

Maybe our current culture will discover that infinite economic growth isn't worth it after vast human tragedies make that conclusion unavoidable.

The reason you’re confused is because people have been demonstrating how the societies you idealize, frequently non-European societies, do seek perpetual growth, they are only limited by the ways they believe they can accomplish that end.

I am begging you to stop with the noble savage/orientalism stuff. What would you call the conquests of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, both wildly untenable endeavors to sustain, if not wild unchecked growth?

The tools to accomplish it might be better and more self reinforcing but the behavior is the same.

DarkCrawler
Apr 6, 2009

by vyelkin

Eiba posted:

Then I just fundamentally do not understand the current or past world as you do.

Something novel happened when Europeans became obsessed with productivity, enclosing the "unproductive" land that the state couldn't tax, which had been utilized by commoners to their own ends for thousands of years. That poo poo's not normal human behavior. Previous societies didn't do that for hundreds of thousands of years, while our modern society couldn't imagine doing anything else.

You fundamentally don't understand rest of the world and its' history, past or current, if that is your conception. Europeans were playing with sticks and stones compared to the rest of the world, literally doing the rise of the civilizations. Not only Mesopotamia and Egypt, but the Indus and Yellow River civilizations as well as American ones.

Excess production is the core of every agricultural society, its upper classes and the rise of wealth and ownership. Europe gained a recent edge thanks to smallpox (excess resources!) and the industrial revolution (improved methods of productivity!), but it did not invent or perfect anything you are talking about.

There was no "common land" that the state could not eke some kind of money from, no matter where you were an agricultural society, and even in hunter-gatherer or nomadic societies increasily hemmed in by agriculture, grazing your herds in the wrong area was a pretty good way of getting an arrow in your face.

Normal human behavior kinda clocked out once the Neolithic Revolution really got off the ground.

DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 11:35 on May 11, 2023

Aztec Galactus
Sep 12, 2002

I AM GRANDO posted:

You know, what even is the point of cable news at a time when breaking news shows up on people’s phones and 30% of the footage on tv news is taken from phone recordings of things people were there for?

To give people who are scared of their phones something else to also be scared of

Cool NIN Shirt
Nov 26, 2007

by vyelkin

Staluigi posted:

This is all important because a lot of pancreatic cancer being "successfully treated" basically means "we retarded the carcinomic spread enough that they didn't kill the patient for a few years" as I understand it

Relapse free recovery isn't pushing back the clock like that, it's removing it. Without surgery, that you can't really do on the pancreas anyway because it's a frail softie held together with prayers

The pancreas can absolutely be removed, not sure where you get the idea that it can’t.

Pancreatic cancer isn’t some super mutant cancer or whatever you’re saying, the issue is that it’s usually only discovered once it has metastasized, at which point removing the cancerous pancreas is of limited utility.

Cool NIN Shirt
Nov 26, 2007

by vyelkin

Jaxyon posted:

He's literally bragged on camera about sexual assault. It probably helps him.

Trump? I don’t think so.

Care to back this claim up with a source?

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.
I assume they're referring to the famous "grab 'em by the pussy" "they'll let you do it if you're famous" stuff from the Access Hollywood video back in 2016.

Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound

Clarste posted:

I assume they're referring to the famous "grab 'em by the pussy" "they'll let you do it if you're famous" stuff from the Access Hollywood video back in 2016.

Which he repeated in his videotaped under-oath deposition for the Carroll trial, which was replayed at the Carrol trial, like within the past week

Cool NIN Shirt
Nov 26, 2007

by vyelkin

Clarste posted:

I assume they're referring to the famous "grab 'em by the pussy" "they'll let you do it if you're famous" stuff from the Access Hollywood video back in 2016.

If we take his statements in good faith, he acknowledges that they consent to the “pussy grabbing” (the “they let you do it if your famous” part that you mention).

It’s crude and indecorous, to be clear, but not an admission of sexual assault.

Jarmak
Jan 24, 2005

Eiba posted:

I am 100% not saying a society that doesn't value infinite growth is necessarily good. Tokugawa Japan is pretty hosed up in a lot of other ways. But this is a non sequitur. The Edo period lasted for centuries. If it was in part the product of Japan failing at incredibly brutal attempts at imperialism... okay? It's still an example of many generations of humans agreeing that "growth" isn't worth it.

It's not an example of anyone agreeing "growth" isn't worth it. It's an example of of several generations of humans pursuing growth so aggressively it upended their entire social structure, not unlike the industrial revolution.

You're artificially limiting your definition of growth to one very specific type of growth which is only tangential to what we're talking about. The "infinite growth" being associated with capitalism is economic growth, not pushing borders on a map, conquest only became relevant to the discussion as a means of getting more resources to feed it. As much as conflict is frequent throughout human history, most successful civilizations recognize that it is way less costly to grow using underutilized resources they already control, and only turn outward when those resources become insufficient to sustain it. Both of your examples are societies which had vast untapped/underutilized resources as a result long periods of internal conflict, and went through periods of pursuing economic growth through internal development.

Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound

Cool NIN Shirt posted:

If we take his statements in good faith, he acknowledges that they consent to the “pussy grabbing” (the “they let you do it if your famous” part that you mention).

It’s crude and indecorous, to be clear, but not an admission of sexual assault.

if you think "they let you do it" == "they consent", then, uh h h h . . . .

dude

no

I AM GRANDO
Aug 20, 2006

Cool NIN Shirt posted:

If we take his statements in good faith, he acknowledges that they consent to the “pussy grabbing” (the “they let you do it if your famous” part that you mention).

It’s crude and indecorous, to be clear, but not an admission of sexual assault.

That’s because he doesn’t understand what consent or sexual assault are. If I say I’m not racist but I understand that mexicans are inherently violent and inferior to the white race, I am still confessing my racism.

E Jean Carroll couldn’t stop him and he was able to grab her by the pussy, but she did not consent. Surely he would say she “let him do it.”

Ravenfood
Nov 4, 2011

Cool NIN Shirt posted:

If we take his statements in good faith, he acknowledges that they consent to the “pussy grabbing” (the “they let you do it if your famous” part that you mention).

It’s crude and indecorous, to be clear, but not an admission of sexual assault.

That is not consent.

WarpedLichen
Aug 14, 2008


Cool NIN Shirt posted:

If we take his statements in good faith, he acknowledges that they consent to the “pussy grabbing” (the “they let you do it if your famous” part that you mention).

It’s crude and indecorous, to be clear, but not an admission of sexual assault.

Yeah I hope enough people have jumped on you, but power imbalance negates consent, that statement is very gross.

th3t00t
Aug 14, 2007

GOOD CLEAN FOOTBALL

Jarmak posted:

That's absurd. Most of recorded history is humans killing each other to gobble up more resources. The main change capitalism brought to the table was individuals were free to do it for themselves instead of primarily helping the king gobble up more resources.

A pre-agricultural, nomadic hunter-gatherer society is an extreme edge case.

Edit: the European colonial empires predate capitalism.
Did that really change though? Capitalism did a good job falsely convincing people that the economy is a meritocracy and that people are free to do it themselves, but in reality we're still just helping the people above us gobble up more resources, we just substituted Kings/lords for CEOs/rich people.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.
I'm not a historical economist, but I think the main thing was that feudal lords had all their wealth in the form of land (which included the labor of the peasants living on it), while the shift to capitalism made the very idea of wealth more... fungible? Like, you could still be rich by owning land (or people), but you could also own like a business or whatever.

Modern billionaire CEOs actually have relatively more power than most feudal lords did though.

Fister Roboto
Feb 21, 2008

Greed has existed all throughout history. Growth has existed all throughout history. Nobody is disputing that. But neither of those statements change the fact that the greed and growth of modern capitalism is wildly unsustainable. And that fact shouldn't be excused or minimized by saying things like "well it's just human nature to be greedy" or "well past societies did it too" or "well socialism would be just as bad".

syntaxrigger
Jul 7, 2011

Actually you owe me 6! But who's countin?

I thought we were done here so I didn't respond. Since we aren't.

Conflating "greed", which is where I got pulled into this conversation, and "the economy" is causing a lot of confusion. I would like to restate what others have said about greed more succinctly.

Humans can be greedy. There is a limit to this greed. Abstracting away the consequences to a community of a person's greed, which is what obscene wealth does, makes it easier to go beyond that limit.

zoux
Apr 28, 2006

Here's the α and Ω of this CNN Trump obsession



They went from record profits to record losses in one quarter because Trump went a way and scared and angry liberals stopped watching cable news. CNN isn't trying to bring in consevatives, they are energizing their base - so to speak - by putting on frightening Trump spectacles for terrified liberals to freak out about. No one who is persuadable on Trump (and it may be that no one is persuadable on Trump, I think public sentiment is pretty well cemented in that regard) watches CNN, we've spent the last 10 years fretting about media bubbles and the fact that half the country gets its news from essentially propaganda sources. Conservative voters don't read the NYT op ed columns, they don't tune into CNN to hear policy discussions, they watch Fox and read Facebook. This was, essentially, CNN trolling their liberal viewership base in the classic sense: putting on intentionally inflammatory content in order to drive engagement. There is a bias in the media, it's not towards a political spectrum, it's towards the bottom line. And Trump is very, very good for the bottom line. They want him to win.

My personal opinion is that Trump doing town halls is the worst thing he can do, he's not articulating a policy vision, he's just ranting about personal grievances. During 2016, the more he was in the news the lower his approval rating went, and when the cycle turned away from him his numbers would recover. Trump is deeply unpopular in a way that no other politician is America is (maybe Hillary lol) and he's never won a popular vote, he's a huge drag on the rest of the GOP ticket, and he lucked his way into the White House based on a black swan outcome that he couldn't come close to repeating in 2020 against a walking corpse with several Republican legislatures doing everything they could to steal a win.

https://twitter.com/brianstelter/status/1656646628411949056

This is an ethics-free conception of the duty of journalism.

zoux fucked around with this message at 14:32 on May 11, 2023

Main Paineframe
Oct 27, 2010

Fister Roboto posted:

Greed has existed all throughout history. Growth has existed all throughout history. Nobody is disputing that. But neither of those statements change the fact that the greed and growth of modern capitalism is wildly unsustainable. And that fact shouldn't be excused or minimized by saying things like "well it's just human nature to be greedy" or "well past societies did it too" or "well socialism would be just as bad".

What's made things unsustainable isn't capitalism itself. It's industrialization, which has allowed humans to exploit the planet's resources far more efficiently than in the past - leading to massive population growth, substantial over-exploitation, and significant negative externalities. Switching

Fister Roboto
Feb 21, 2008

Main Paineframe posted:

What's made things unsustainable isn't capitalism itself. It's industrialization, which has allowed humans to exploit the planet's resources far more efficiently than in the past - leading to massive population growth, substantial over-exploitation, and significant negative externalities. Switching

And what was the dominant economic system throughout almost all of industrialization?

Spoiler: it was capitalism. Industrialization was the means by which capitalism became better able to grow and consume resources. It didn't just happen by itself. This argument is getting absurd.

Kavros
May 18, 2011

sleep sleep sleep
fly fly post post
sleep sleep sleep

Eiba posted:

I am 100% not saying a society that doesn't value infinite growth is necessarily good. Tokugawa Japan is pretty hosed up in a lot of other ways. But this is a non sequitur. The Edo period lasted for centuries. If it was in part the product of Japan failing at incredibly brutal attempts at imperialism... okay? It's still an example of many generations of humans agreeing that "growth" isn't worth it.

Those generations didn't agree on that, though. The strictness of class division that they enforced during that timeperiod was essentially to mandate economic and agricultural growth for the sake of the ruling class. All that's really demonstrated by the transition to the edo period was that, for the time being, growth and exploitation would have to focus mostly inside the country because of how poorly their previous imperial occupations of other territory went in the end. I don't really think they get bonus points for this kind of 'inward focus' mandated by a generational-scale loss of force projection capability, especially considering how the experiment ended with the return of imperial occupation

pencilhands
Aug 20, 2022

Cool NIN Shirt posted:

If we take his statements in good faith, he acknowledges that they consent to the “pussy grabbing” (the “they let you do it if your famous” part that you mention).

It’s crude and indecorous, to be clear, but not an admission of sexual assault.

uhh

mods?

Leon Trotsky 2012
Aug 27, 2009

YOU CAN TRUST ME!*


*Israeli Government-affiliated poster
Republicans released their 4-month investigation into the Biden Crime Family.

You will be shocked to learn that they could not find any evidence that Hunter Biden was laundering money from the Chinese government to make the Biden administration aggressively pro-China.

But, just because there was no bribery or corruption by anyone in the Biden Crime Family, that doesn't mean that they weren't still a crime family. They uncovered a major scandal and coverup.

1) In 2020, during a Presidential primary debate, Biden said, "The only guy who made money from China is this guy [indicating Donald Trump]. He’s the only one. Nobody else has made money from China." However, that was a lie because it was public knowledge that the company Hunter Biden worked for had a contract for $4.8 million with an energy company in Shanghai that was owned by the Chinese government.

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1656524579949498369

quote:

House Republican Report Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by President Biden

After months of investigation and many public accusations of corruption against Mr. Biden and his family, the first report of the premier House G.O.P. inquiry showed no proof of such misconduct.

After four months of investigation, House Republicans who promised to use their new majority to unearth evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden acknowledged on Wednesday that they had yet to uncover incriminating material about him, despite their frequent insinuations that he and his family have been involved in criminal conduct and corruption.

At a much-publicized news conference on Capitol Hill to show the preliminary findings of their premier investigation into Mr. Biden and his family, leading Republicans released financial documents detailing how some of the president’s relatives were paid more than $10 million from foreign sources between 2015 and 2017.

Republicans described the transactions as proof of “influence peddling” by Mr. Biden’s family, including his son Hunter Biden, and referenced some previously known, if unflattering, details of the younger Mr. Biden’s business dealings. Those included an episode in which he accepted a 2.8-carat diamond from a Chinese businessman. G.O.P. lawmakers also produced material suggesting that President Biden and his allies had at times made misleading statements in their efforts to push back aggressively against accusations of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden.

But on Wednesday, the Republicans conceded that they had yet to find evidence of a specific corrupt action Mr. Biden took in office in connection with any of the business deals his son entered into. Instead, their presentation underscored how little headway top G.O.P. lawmakers have made in finding clear evidence of questionable transactions they can tie to Mr. Biden, their chief political rival.

It has not stopped them from accusing the president of serious misconduct.

“I want to be clear: This committee is investigating President Biden and his family’s shady business dealings to capitalize on Joe Biden’s public office that risks our country’s national security,” said Representative James R. Comer, Republican of Kentucky and the chairman of the Oversight Committee. He emphasized that the president — not just his son — would be the target of his investigation, which he said would now “enter a new phase,” in which he would subpoena specific financial information based on material learned through bank records.

Federal prosecutors have examined Hunter Biden’s international business activities as part of a criminal investigation. But the only charges they are considering, according to people familiar with the case, are unrelated to his work abroad. They include tax charges related to his failure to file his tax returns over several years, and a charge of lying about his drug use on a federal form he filled out to purchase a handgun.

To date, Mr. Comer’s committee has issued four bank subpoenas, obtained thousands of financial records and spoken with several people he describes as whistle-blowers. Mr. Comer has also hired James Mandolfo, a former federal prosecutor who has experience investigating foreign corruption, to oversee the inquiry.

Here’s what we know so far.

The House Oversight Committee report focused on payments made to companies connected to Hunter Biden from businesses and individuals in Romania and China. Bank records obtained by the committee show the receipt of money from a foreign company connected to Gabriel Popoviciu, who was the subject of a criminal investigation and prosecution for corruption in Romania.

In 2015, Mr. Popoviciu retained Hunter Biden, who is a lawyer, while his father was vice president, to help try to fend off charges. That effort was unsuccessful and, in 2016, Mr. Popoviciu was convicted on charges related to a land deal in northern Bucharest, the Romanian capital.

Mr. Comer has also focused on John R. Walker, an associate of Hunter Biden who was involved in a joint venture with executives of CEFC China Energy, a now-bankrupt Chinese conglomerate.

A Shanghai-based company, State Energy HK Limited, that was affiliated with CEFC China Energy sent millions to Robinson Walker LLC, a company associated with Mr. Walker, who then made payments to Hunter Biden and other Biden family members.

Hunter Biden had cultivated a business relationship with Ye Jianming, the founder of CEFC, who has been investigated by the Chinese authorities on suspicion of economic crimes. In 2017, Mr. Ye gave Hunter Biden a 2.8-carat diamond as a thank-you for a meeting.

“What would they be bribing me for? My dad wasn’t in office,” Hunter Biden told The New Yorker in 2019, adding that he gave the diamond to his associates. “I knew it wasn’t a good idea to take it. I just felt like it was weird.”

CEFC had hoped to invest in a liquefied natural gas venture in Louisiana, but that deal ultimately flopped.

Representatives of Hunter Biden characterize his business offerings at the time as providing legal and consulting services.

The payments came at a time when Hunter Biden’s life and finances were spiraling amid his drug addiction, and after the death of his brother, Beau Biden, from brain cancer. Hunter Biden had begun a romantic relationship with his brother’s widow. His business partner, Mr. Walker, and his uncle James Biden were pursuing international business work.

Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Hunter Biden, said in a statement that House Republicans had revealed nothing new in their report.

“Today’s so-called ‘revelations' are retread, repackaged misstatements of perfectly proper meetings and business by private citizens.” Mr. Lowell said.

President Biden has falsely denied his son had ties to Chinese businesses.
None of the payments detailed in the report went to President Biden himself, nor has Mr. Comer’s investigation produced any evidence that Mr. Biden ever took a corrupt action in connection with his son’s business dealings.

But Mr. Biden has made several false or misleading statements about the matter.

During the 2020 presidential debate, Mr. Biden claimed that no one in his family had received money from China.

“My son has not made money in terms of this thing about — what are you talking about, China,” Mr. Biden said, turning the charge on his opponent, President Donald J. Trump. “The only guy who made money from China is this guy. He’s the only one. Nobody else has made money from China.”

This year, Mr. Biden also claimed that it was “not true” that family members received more than $1 million from a Chinese firm.

Aides to Mr. Biden said he was speaking colloquially and was pushing back generally on claims that his administration had been corrupted by Chinese money.

Presidents’ families have long made money off the family name.
During his news conference, Mr. Comer acknowledged that Hunter Biden would have been far from the first relative of a president or vice president to try to make money off the family name.

He invoked Billy Carter, the brother of former President Jimmy Carter, who visited Libya and received a $220,000 loan; and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law whose firm has received hundreds of millions from Persian Gulf nations.

“This has been a pattern for a long time,” Mr. Comer said. “Republicans and Democrats have both complained about presidents’ families receiving money.”

However, Mr. Comer has conceded that he has no interest in investigating Mr. Kushner’s conduct.

Officials allied with Mr. Biden played a role in wrongly discrediting Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The report from Mr. Comer came as a second Republican-led House committee is investigating a related issue. The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday released a report about a letter from 51 former intelligence and security officials in 2020 that questioned materials — substantial portions of which were later verified as authentic — from a laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware repair shop and suggested they might be part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

The Republicans argue that the letter influenced the public to discount the materials on the laptop, which contained evidence of Hunter Biden’s drug use and sex life, which they believed would harm his father’s electoral chances against Mr. Trump.

The Judiciary Committee report detailed the role played by Antony J. Blinken, now the secretary of state and then a Biden campaign official, in spearheading the letter, and said a C.I.A. employee had been involved in soliciting at least one signature for it.

The intelligence officials maintain their letter stated they had no evidence of a Russian disinformation campaign, and that they were merely stating an opinion.

Mark Zaid, a lawyer who represents seven signatories to the letter, said on Twitter that the report merely proved that “private citizens lawfully exercised 1st Amendment rights” and added that there was not “even one falsehood” in the letter.

“I know of no signatory who retracts a single word,” Mr. Zaid wrote.

Jarmak
Jan 24, 2005

Fister Roboto posted:

Greed has existed all throughout history. Growth has existed all throughout history. Nobody is disputing that. But neither of those statements change the fact that the greed and growth of modern capitalism is wildly unsustainable. And that fact shouldn't be excused or minimized by saying things like "well it's just human nature to be greedy" or "well past societies did it too" or "well socialism would be just as bad".

Past societies and economic systems producing the same effects, including attempts at socialism, is evidence that "capitalism" isn't the root cause of the problem nor is socialism the panacea to solve it.

I've never seen a reason to believe the political apparatus that controls resources in a command economy is any more resistant to being undercut by corrupt influence/politics/social maneuvering than the supposed meritocracy is under capitalism. If anything the inherently more centralized and authoritarian power structure required to administer a command economy seems more susceptible to these influences. The children of powerful bureaucrats and those with connections to them in a command economy are no less advantaged than the children of the wealthy in a capitalist one, and a committee can be just as unempathetic to the poor as a board of directors.

Jarmak
Jan 24, 2005

Fister Roboto posted:

And what was the dominant economic system throughout almost all of industrialization?

Spoiler: it was capitalism. Industrialization was the means by which capitalism became better able to grow and consume resources. It didn't just happen by itself. This argument is getting absurd.

Industrialization was the means by which humans became able to grow and consume resources. Capitalism doesn't consume resources, people do, capitalism is the system which allocates those resources.

It's absurd to just assume casualty because two things existed at the same time.

zoux
Apr 28, 2006

Isn't this whole argument adjacent to the millenia-old philosophy question about whether man is born inherently good, evil, or neutral? (Also what's the philosophical term for that question)

https://twitter.com/peterbakernyt/status/1656467730126585856

There are a lot of contenders but I really think I hate Peter Baker the most out of all the major outlet political journalists.

zoux fucked around with this message at 15:03 on May 11, 2023

Fister Roboto
Feb 21, 2008

Jarmak posted:

Capitalism doesn't consume resources, people do

"Guns dont kill people, people do." A statement that is technically true, but functionally meaningless. You cant ban people, so you have to deal with the tool that they use to cause harm. And in this case, the tool is capitalism.

I honestly dont care what you call it or what you blame it on. But our current state is not sustainable. It needs to be fixed. If all that matters to you is not blaming it on capitalism, then fine, lets do that. But i guarantee that any viable solution is going to look an awful lot like abolishing capitalism.

Mellow Seas
Oct 9, 2012
Probation
Can't post for 10 years!
The whole conversation is kind of academic because there is a lot of space between “$24 trillion” and “$infinity,” - approximately $infinity, by my calculations - and I would imagine that somewhere along that line we will find some other new paradigm for describing prosperity, or our civilization will collapse.

(Of course, the conversation being academic doesn’t mean it’s not worth having.)

Fister Roboto posted:

And what was the dominant economic system throughout almost all of industrialization?

Spoiler: it was capitalism. Industrialization was the means by which capitalism became better able to grow and consume resources. It didn't just happen by itself. This argument is getting absurd.
Isn’t this argument undercut by the fact that we had a large non-capitalist industrial empire that was no more measured in its use of resources than capitalist states and empires?

Like, yes, there were more capitalist societies than socialist ones during the Industrial Revolution, but that doesn’t really prove anything on its own. If capitalism was specifically to blame for industrial resource use, wouldn’t there be any indication of that in the history of the largest, most significant and most successful socialist society we’ve seen?

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

zoux posted:

Isn't this whole argument adjacent to the millenia-old philosophy question about whether man is born inherently good, evil, or neutral? (Also what's the philosophical term for that question)

Possibly the state of nature or social contract question, e.g. Hobbes(nasty, brutish and short, so kings are great to prevent that) /Locke (great, we have inherent rights that coincidentally reflect my personal preferences) /Rousseau (blank slate, but also better than society today with all those newfangled ideas).

None of these are very informative, other than to illustrate that imagining humanity as having some inherent quality prior to or outside of its current conditions is a pretty ineffective way to approach these problems, because writers have tended to just import their prior beliefs onto the question of what the nature of man is like.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 15:33 on May 11, 2023

Mellow Seas
Oct 9, 2012
Probation
Can't post for 10 years!
I don’t even think ascribing a desire for ever-increasing prosperity to human nature is the same thing as describing humans as “inherently evil.” There can be altruistic motivations for increasing prosperity - in a hunter-gatherer context, supporting the continued health of your band/tribe.

It can be both true that “always wanting more” is a basic facet of human nature AND that modern, excessive, “evil” greed is not the inevitable growth of that seed, or as a part of human nature itself. Even if the wealth-beyond-measure impulse was part of our nature, that alone wouldn’t be sufficient to make humanity “inherently evil.”

(And I do think it’s fair to think that the “infinite” type of greed is, if post-agricultural, pre-capitalist. Why else would we have the parable of King Midas?)

Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 15:36 on May 11, 2023

Harold Fjord
Jan 3, 2004

Mellow Seas posted:

The whole conversation is kind of academic because there is a lot of space between “$24 trillion” and “$infinity,” - approximately $infinity, by my calculations - and I would imagine that somewhere along that line we will find some other new paradigm for describing prosperity, or our civilization will collapse.

(Of course, the conversation being academic doesn’t mean it’s not worth having.)

Isn’t this argument undercut by the fact that we had a large non-capitalist industrial empire that was no more measured in its use of resources than capitalist states and empires?

Like, yes, there were more capitalist societies than socialist ones during the Industrial Revolution, but that doesn’t really prove anything on its own. If capitalism was specifically to blame for industrial resource use, wouldn’t there be any indication of that in the history of the largest, most significant and most successful socialist society we’ve seen?

Those societies had to engage in the context of the established capitalist societies. They were forced to compete on those terms or perish


A lot like how companies have to engage in certain shittybbehaviors to succeed in the stock market, actually

Barrel Cactaur
Oct 6, 2021

Jarmak posted:

Past societies and economic systems producing the same effects, including attempts at socialism, is evidence that "capitalism" isn't the root cause of the problem nor is socialism the panacea to solve it.

I've never seen a reason to believe the political apparatus that controls resources in a command economy is any more resistant to being undercut by corrupt influence/politics/social maneuvering than the supposed meritocracy is under capitalism. If anything the inherently more centralized and authoritarian power structure required to administer a command economy seems more susceptible to these influences. The children of powerful bureaucrats and those with connections to them in a command economy are no less advantaged than the children of the wealthy in a capitalist one, and a committee can be just as unempathetic to the poor as a board of directors.

The soviet system was essentially imperialism for Moscow focused on centralized control of industry as its model of extraction instead of cash crop territory control. Its corruption problems massively worsened when the only people with any preexisting foreign exchange, criminals and corrupt officials, were allowed to freely buy all the state managed assets for a fraction of their true value in a privatization fire-sale. The Chinese systems economic reforms away from the malaise of post Maoist autocracy was very vulnerable to corruption, but the corruption problem massively worsened when state industry was allowed to be privatized without disrupting the corrupt interplay between production and industrial oversight. Both times it happened with the encouragement of western free market absolutists who managed to get out competed both times because they didn't have as good information or networks of connections to actually cash in on the fire-sales of state assets and survive (the Russian system became so captured by local oligarchs they were able to weaponize the legal system, and the Chinese system required majority Chinese ownership in control, while often directly picking winners).

Its a fundamental rule that you have to judge a system by what it does, not what it claims. Both of these systems were actually hostile to worker control at every level, far more so than even the very indirect western systems of representative democracy. At no point were they ever actually closer to socialism, because both the state and industry were autocratic. They were and still are, at best, socialism themed dictatorships. Norway is closer to every form of socialist theory then they ever were.

The phrase "Actually existing socialism" was the death knell of the soviet union, purely because it showed the government had abandoned the pretext it ever intended to change. Command economies are incredibly prone to stagnation because they lack incentives to improve anything, and often lack mechanisms to actually enforce rules, instead ending up cheating themselves because they have a mentality that treats failure as a moral problem instead of a systematic one. It was far easier to over-report production numbers than solve production problems, for example.

Capitalism is proudly the source of many problems. Just see how viciously the capitol class lobby to be able to literally dump the consequences of their actions onto the public. Corporations love socialism for the capitalist class, handouts to prop up businesses or tax breaks to move jobs from city to city every few years. They love big government budgets so much they wish they could replace bits of it and be a monopoly providing those services on the public dime, able to FORCE everyone to buy their product indirectly, instead of just having to bid on contracts.

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TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

zoux posted:


They went from record profits to record losses in one quarter because Trump went a way and scared and angry liberals stopped watching cable news. CNN isn't trying to bring in consevatives, they are energizing their base - so to speak - by putting on frightening Trump spectacles for terrified liberals to freak out about. No one who is persuadable on Trump (and it may be that no one is persuadable on Trump, I think public sentiment is pretty well cemented in that regard) watches CNN, we've spent the last 10 years fretting about media bubbles and the fact that half the country gets its news from essentially propaganda sources. Conservative voters don't read the NYT op ed columns, they don't tune into CNN to hear policy discussions, they watch Fox and read Facebook. This was, essentially, CNN trolling their liberal viewership base in the classic sense: putting on intentionally inflammatory content in order to drive engagement. There is a bias in the media, it's not towards a political spectrum, it's towards the bottom line. And Trump is very, very good for the bottom line. They want him to win.

CNN's leadership has been pretty open about a deliberate rightward shift. They want to eat Fox from the left.

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