kava

people with significant money in art assets have it documented and insured. if he had 30 pieces just by warhols and additional, we're likely talking millions of dollars of assets.

nobody leaves millions of dollars lying around without some sort of insurance

to be honest, this is a great opportunity for him to cash out of all his expensive art in one fell swoop. i would be elated if I were him

Corporations only have one goal. To make as much money as possible.

There is nothing else. There is no moral obligation. There is no social contract. There is nothing but making as much profit as possible at all costs.

This is why capitalist democracy will always devolve. If I'm a large corporation that is powerful enough for meaningful political influence- I will always try to manipulate the system into a) eroding the free market so I have less competition and b) influencing the government to enact policies that subsidizes my operations. Eventually you end up with a system like 1930s Germany or modern China- where the state picks and chooses some favored corporations and allow them to dominate the market in exchange for cooperation and subservience. Like Volkswagen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen#/media/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-H06734,_Grundsteinlegung_f%C3%BCr_Werk_des_KdF-Wagens.jpg

So when a company says something about how much they love X or Y or Z and inclusion and diversity and whatever other buzz word of the month- they are saying it in order to maximize profits and they will stop saying it the moment the calculus changes.

$$$ insurance payout

I disagree with this. I think we are in a game renaissance right now with many great games being released all the time.

What I agree does suck are Triple A games. Why do they suck? Well, they cost a lot of money to make. You need a team of dozens of people working over a long period of time along with lots of marketing. Millions and tens of millions of dollars can easily go into a modern AAA game.

So when you have millions of dollars of investor money behind you- you're not going to take many risks. You're going to be as conservative and formulaic as possible so that you can better predict what you will bring in through revenue. This is why there's a new Call of Duty, FIFA, and Assassin's Creed every single year. And they're all virtually the same game with slight changes.

In my opinion if you want to see actual innovation and creativity, you (generally) have to look outside of these types of games. Not even necessarily niche indie games, but smaller scale developers. They don't have nearly as much overhead and they tend to have passionate individuals with a vision. This gives them more flexibility.

So as a general rule of thumb, you'll find more ambitious games coming from smaller developers. And with ambition comes both great successes and failures. But the cream rises to the top.

This is why the older I get, the more cynical I become about democracy. People are easily frightened herd animals who often refuse to look past the surface level shiny veneer. It always devolves. Every single democracy in history falls prey to the populist who takes advantage of this human weakness.

The modern globalist system has left you out of the manufacturing job you expected to have? Are you frightened about your financial future and your children's future? Here, I have a solution for you. We will build a wall and deport the brown people. It's all their fault. Please ignore the man behind the curtain.

Instead of us having an educated populace that sees through the wool being pulled over their eyes, they instead put their heads in the sand and choose to full-send into whatever right-wing ideology is thrown their way. It happened before, it will happen again.

The superior system, I think, would look something like the Chinese although they are not perfect by any means.

What they do is in primary school, they test the children and see who has a strong aptitude. They take these children out of the normal class and groom them to be party leaders. These party leaders then eventually end up as the leaders in the future. China actually is a pseudo-democracy- it's just that only party members get to vote. And there are actually over 2 million party members. But the difference there is that it's more of a meritocracy. There is still nepotism and whatnot, but the leaders slowly rise up over time based on results.

Look at Xi Jinping for example

He lived in a yaodong in the village of Liangjiahe, Shaanxi province, where he joined the CCP after several failed attempts and worked as the local party secretary. After studying chemical engineering at Tsinghua University as a worker-peasant-soldier student, Xi rose through the ranks politically in China's coastal provinces. Xi was governor of Fujian from 1999 to 2002, before becoming governor and party secretary of neighboring Zhejiang from 2002 to 2007. Following the dismissal of the party secretary of Shanghai, Chen Liangyu, Xi was transferred to replace him for a brief period in 2007. He subsequently joined the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) of the CCP the same year and was the first-ranking secretary of the Central Secretariat in October 2007. In 2008, he was designated as Hu Jintao's presumed successor as paramount leader.

The way it works is you start in a lower spot and work your way up slowly over time. And he was actually destined for failure due to his father being a "traitor"

The son of Chinese communist veteran Xi Zhongxun, Xi was exiled to rural Yanchuan County as a teenager following his father's purge during the Cultural Revolution.

But his results ended up pushing him to the top anyway.

This sort of meritocratic technocratic society will always win out over our populist oligarchy. And to the doubters, consider that our system is not any less elitist.

Instead of testing children and grooming them for leadership, we do it based on last name and wealth. If your parents went to Harvard, you grow up with tutors and extracurriculars and all the support you could want. Then you are groomed for success by joining an Ivy League school, you join some sort of fraternity that presidents were a part of and you meet the future senators and CEOs.

It's the same thing except instead of results and meritocracy- it's more influenced by wealth and nepotism.

Of course I'm not claiming the Chinese system is somehow ideal, but I believe democracy is fatally flawed. Plato wrote about this in "The Republic" already countless years ago. Ironically, in his ideal Republic (which to be fair is sort of a dystopia) they actually groom capable children like the Chinese do for party leadership.

Maybe we can just develop generalized artificial intelligence and have it run our society for us. I'd have more faith in the AI than I do in our congress.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/how-2-debunked-accounts-of-sexual-violence-on-oct-7-fueled-a-global-dispute-over-israel-hamas-war

There's a bit by Zizek where he's quoting Lacan. Lacan uses the analogy of a jealous husband who believes his wife is cheating on him.

Jacques Lacan claimed that, even if a jealous husband’s claim about his wife — that she sleeps around with other men — is true, his jealousy is still pathological. Why? The true question is “not is his jealousy well-grounded?”, but “why does he need jealousy to maintain his self-identity?”.

The man has a deep-seated psychological need to be a victim. He needs the idea of the cheating wife to maintain this identity. In this case, his obsession with his cheating wife, even if it's true and she's sleeping around with everyone in town, is part of a pathology meant to protect his psyche from breaking.

That's the Lacanian part. As Zizek often does, he takes this type of individualized psychoanalysis and expands it up to the realm of societal ideology. The example he gives is of the Nazis and their obsession with the Jews.

Along the same lines, one could say that even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true — they exploit Germans; they seduce German girls — which they were not, of course, their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) pathological, since it represses the true reason why the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position.

An example he gives is that Jews were exploiting Germans. And this is, on its face, can be a true statement. Some Jews were bankers and therefore charging interest and profiting from Germans. Some young Jews were going around and seducing young German girls. Etc.

But the fact is, it doesn't matter if the Jews are doing this or aren't doing that. The Nazi obsession with the Jew has nothing to do with the Jew seducing young German women. The obsession is a necessary prerequisite for the Nazi to maintain their ideological position. A Nazi needs the Jew to be a scapegoat. To be a symbol of the Other- to use as an ambiguous threat; a vague amorphous barbaric enemy.

The Jews control the world and the global capitalist system. They are devious and scheming and mean to exploit us. On the other hand, the Jew is a stupid primitive animal who has inferior genes. They are everything and they are nothing.

I would take this and use this article as an example of a pathological ideological obsession on the Israeli side.

Even if the claims are true, which from what I've read there isn't much evidence at all, that Hamas raped many young women on Oct 7th, I'd argue that it's pathological. The Israelis need the idea of the barbaric and savage Palestinian in order to maintain their ideological position. When they talk about the rapes, it doesn't matter if the rapes really happened or not. It's there for an ideological purpose.

And just like the Nazi claims about the Jews- using small truths to create a large lie- the Israelis are following line by line with the playbook.

I provided them. You refuse to acknowledge them. I can only speculate why that is. That is OK.

If you do not want to participate in this attempt to find common ground and instead just want to argue with someone online in an endless circle, that's OK. You either choose to engage in good faith or I will stop responding.

I beg to differ. The situation was MUCH better in this regard in Western Europe 15-20 years ago when being openly far-right would get you socially ostracized for the most part, and media didn’t routinely bring far-right mouthpieces on national TV.

the question we need to ask is why was being right-wing socially unacceptable back then?

why is it OK for a politician like Trump to say "immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country" today whereas just 20 years ago that would immediately end a political career?

it's not because we had more censorship.

the why is what we need to address. without economic security and legitimate institutions, we are lost.

censorship is not the solution and in fact it's actively harmful. any mechanisms we create for a government to start censoring will inevitably be taken over by fascists when they come to power. and I think we only got a few years left at best

True, the far right has lost of lot of ground since musk took over twitter

we aren't talking about some social media platform. we're talking about a nation state censoring speech. these are two radically different things.

having said that, even on social media platforms with modern machine learning algorithms you can't effectively censor. Look at how the far-right uses memes and secret symbols to communicate even through algorithms. for example the pepe the frog memes, the 88, the hand symbols, etc.

you can't say "rape" on youtube or tiktok so people just use "grape" instead. the Chinese do similar things on their internet. censorship is always going to be a losing battle.

Hanging Nazis was really a mistake post war

executing people who committed war crimes and genocide versus a country censoring speech. again.. two radically different things.

Giving them parlement [sic] seats is the best way to take power from them.

explain the connection between "giving" seats to Nazis (last I checked we had elections) in the current discussion about a country censoring speech.

(Yes, this is how stupid you sound)

you are free to spend your time on the internet saying anything you like. if making these weak appeal to ridicule comments makes you feel stronger, I support you

Censoring the far-right doesn't make it go away. It just pushes it underground where it becomes even more radical outside of the moderating influence of the mainstream.

The solution is not censorship, but to understand what is causing the rise in right wing radicalism and address the root cause.

That root cause is the total loss of faith institutions coupled with economic insecurity felt by the working class. When people are scared and angry, they will turn to those who give them simple solutions and an easy scapegoat. It's a tale as old as time.

You can try and censor all you want, it won't ultimately make a difference.

This is the only way to rationally discuss emotionally difficult topics that have been bombarded by propaganda.

We need to come to a base set of facts that we can both agree on because otherwise, we will talk in circles endlessly. You certainly have the energy and desire to write about this- you've written some detailed long comments and have kept responding until now.

I have a feeling you don't want to continue because you understand if we go down this road, there will be some cognitive dissonance. That's OK. I'm not forcing you to do anything. This is a voluntary participation in a casual online forums. I spent a lot of time and effort on my comments to you, so I'm not expecting you to act like a monkey.

Ok that can be the first statement we agree on. I agree with it. I said earlier you could make statements. So we will have that be our first axiom.

1. Russia is a corrupt post-soviet state whose people, outside of its imperial core, live in often abject poverty

Can you go through the other ones I placed earlier and either "Yes or no because xyz"