before you praise America or Europe, remember where that wealth comes from

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X

Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade. Past attempts to estimate the scale and value of this drain have faced a number of conceptual and empirical limitations, and have been unable to capture the upstream resources and labour embodied in traded goods. Here we use environmental input-output data and footprint analysis to quantify the physical scale of net appropriation from the South in terms of embodied resources and labour over the period 1990 to 2015. We then represent the value of appropriated resources in terms of prevailing market prices. Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.

Russia is communist

when leftists say "private property" it means "means of production." Factories, etc.

Your house is "personal property." You still own that under socialism.

no one gives a shit where you want us to post, goat.

similarly, there are people now, calling bullshit on the xinjiang organ harvesting narratives

first of all, props for organizing.

denying genocide

This is way too swift and easy a dismissal. Things are bad in Xinjiang, but there is undeniably also a lot of bullshit floating around on the topic. Even the UN concedes there is no mass killing or organ harvesting. A lot of claims come from known bullshitters like Adrien Zens, the folks at Radio Free Asia, the NED, and other sources connected to the US state department. Xinjiang is a complex topic and should be discussed in a complex way, not just "anyone who disputes any aspect of the prevailing western narrative is a genocide denying monster."

A million Iraqis died because Americans believed a fake story in 2003. More died in the 90s because Americans believed the Nayirah testimony. But if you had gone on an internet forum in 2003 and tried to debunk the Iraqi WMD reports, you would have looked like Charlie from IASIP with the red strings all over the wall.

There were forged documents showing Saddam had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger. There was testimony from a fake Iraqi nuclear scientist named Khidir Hamza. There were accounts of stockpiles of chemical weapons in glass capsules. There were diagrams of mobile chemical weapons manufacturing systems. There were the aluminum tubes, alleged to be parts for uranium enrichment equipment. There were names and dates and purchasing records, interviews, witnesses, I mean the list goes on, I'm scratching the surface. And the politicians and the media for both parties all vouched for the information and relentlessly pushed the case.

It seems trivial now, but the story was persuasive at the time, and debunking it was no easy task. If America didn't drag multiple countries into an expensive war based on that story, the details never would have been scrutinized to such an extent, and we would probably still believe it.

when a majority white community mocks a chinese man by comparing his appearance to a yellow bear, it's a little weird

i mean it's basically a trolley problem. whether or not we blame someone who was born into naziism, at some point we have to stop them before they hurt others. and if the nazis are armed and organized, we start running out of peaceful ways to stop them.

one of the features rich capitalist countries share is extracting trillions of dollars out of poorer countries every year lol

the best time to treat cancer is early, before it metastasizes and becomes inoperable

• 70% of Americans want singlepayer healthcare
• 90% want universal background checks for firearm purchases
• 75% want Citizen's United repealed

and yet these and other popular policies remain politically impossible

Study: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens:

From the abstract:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

further down:

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

What is it, like, 70% of Americans want single payer healthcare?