The problem isn’t just publishing though, it’s academia as well. Scientists are incentivized to publish in “prestigious” closed access journals such as Nature. They are led to believe it’s better for their career than publishing in open access journals such as PLOS One. As such, groundbreaking papers often get paywalled. Universities then feel obligated to pay outrageous subscription fees to access them.
Most places in the US developed in a similarly shitty way thanks to the logic of American capitalism. That doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t ethnic and cultural diversity.
I believe so. However, the NSA’s mass surveillance programs still are authorized under section 702 of FISA which is another Bush era law.
I think it’s more a reflection of the media people consume. It’s easy for people to forget Bush’s war crimes when he’s been rehabilitated in part to make Trump look like an exceptional threat.
Bush sued to stop a recount in Florida that would have likely led to Gore winning the 2000 presidential election. A conservative Supreme Court majority sided with Bush and stopped the recount. It makes Trump’s whole “STOP THE COUNT!” look amateurish in comparison. Bush actually was able to stop the count and got away with it.
Gore didn’t want Americans to start questioning the legitimacy of our democracy so he conceded. The rally around the flag effect after 9/11 helped quash any further criticisms of how Bush came to office.
I think their administrations likely had equally bad intentions. The incompetence of Trump’s administration just means they acted more erratically. They were also much worse at getting press on their side and worse at covering up their actions.
They offered him up to be tried in a third country and were open to negotiating. That’s still offering him up. The invasion just ensured that the Taliban and even Al Queda had plenty of new recruits. Bin Laden also remained at large for almost another decade. I’d consider it an abject failure if it wasn’t clear that the Bush administration didn’t really give a damn about their stated objectives.
Instead they just wanted to extend the US’s military influence into Central Asia and make a quick buck of military contracts in the process.
I mean the Taliban literally offered up Bin Laden but Bush rejected the offer and instead chose to invade. 20 years later and hundreds of thousands there’s nothing to show for it. It’s not like there weren’t people critical of the invasion at the time.
Okay but Bush actually stole a presidential election.
Bush is objectively worse on every level. They’re both terrible and the people in their administrations were both soulless gouls. However, Bush’s administration was far more effective in carrying out their repugnant agenda.
People will say Trump tried to steal an election. That’s true. But Bush ACTUALLY stole the election in 2000. Bush also gave us 2 wars which killed in total over a million people and led to the rise of ISIS. Trump’s admin tried it’s best to get the US into a war with Iran but couldn’t make it happen. Bush’s administration also helped get the US into the Great Recession from which the American working class has never truly recovered. Trump doesn’t hold a candle to the kind of damage Bush inflicted on the US and world.
Yes and no. Increased consumption can stimulate an economy but there are are some limitations. This is usually only true if the economy is simultaneously building a middle class. There are also hard limits on improvements to technology and resource extraction. As such capitalists can’t always find ways to entice people to consume more. That leaves them with raising prices and suppressing wages if they want to increase profits.
Companies are competing with each other to maximize profit. If there aren’t new markets for them to grow into, companies can only grow by reducing cost and bringing in more revenue. As such they make shittier products while also pushing prices as high as they can go. This is an unfortunate consequence of how capitalism works.
If there is no “real” to be had then how can your brain manufacture an imitation of the “real” in the first place?
Marx definitely did not believe capitalism would produce more surplus than scientific socialism. However, I doubt he believed it was a switch you could throw and suddenly have a more productive economy. His point was that you could approach the problem scientifically. Through hypothesis testing and experimentation you could develop something more rational than the anarchy of the market.
That said, communist governments haven’t ever found themselves in a position where they can safely experiment with a planned economy. The USSR was struggling for decades to defend itself from foreign adversaries. That’s why it developed a tightly controlled and powerful bureaucracy which eventually led to it’s downfall. It’s also why China and Vietnam decided it was safer to experiment with market reforms given that they are at an economic disadvantage to capitalist countries. Other attempts at building a socialist economy have been thwarted by either US backed coups or sanctions, as was the case with Chile and Cuba.
The US used to have stronger social safety nets and they’ve been progressively eaten away at. It seems like the same process is happening in other countries with strong social safety nets. The riots in Paris over an increase is the retirement age is just one example. If you try to understand why that’s the trend it’s hard not to blame capitalism.
You should know that most Marxists believe capitalism is an economic engine unlike anything that came before it. That doesn’t mean we can’t build a more rational system. If we wanted to approach the problem scientifically we would study capitalism, understand how it works and came to be, form hypotheses for how to build something better, and then experiment.
I’d also add that the formation of the modern government, ie liberal democratic states, and the development of capitalism are one and the same. Our totalizing market economy can not exist without governments ensuring conditions are right for market exchange to operate smoothly. As such, I don’t think it’s possible to say a failure of governments are not a failure of capitalism. It’s a package deal so to speak.
Well that’s exactly the problem. If people use AI generated images for commercial purposes they may accidentally infringe on someone else’s copyright. Since AI models are a black box there isn’t really a good way to avoid this.