Comments by "Piccalilli Pit" (@piccalillipit9211) on "New Russian law may criminalize legitimate reporting" video.
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@Rose-hx9vk NO - wrong again. Im 52 years old. I have travelled in 53 countries, lived on 23 continents, I'm an author on psychology and the collapse of civilisations - and NO I dont care about your personal property. "Research Cuba" - I've interviewed over 1000 people who lived under communism in the ex-soviet union - I am LITERALLY typing this IN the ex-Soviet Union. I speak Russian and Bulgarian дори мога да чета и пиша на български. And the schools under communism were FANTASTIC, so shut up with that BS for starters. Many of the people I interviewed had 2, 3 even 4 university degrees.
AND NO they do NOT thank the USA for bankrupting the USDSR they hate you for it - you destroyed their lives.
OH - the USA is collapsing - you have entered "cascading systems failure" and there is no way out...
This is the list of contributing factors to societal collapse:
Plague / disease Y
Environmental change Y
Massive wealth inequality Y
Loss of the administrative class Y
The government stops governing Y
Attack from the outside - now includes cyber attack Y
Loss of faith in the political system Y
Economic collapse Y
Exposed obvious corruption Y
Crumbling infrastructure Y
Mismanagement of a crisis Y
Societal division Y
Loss of belief in the unity of the society Y
Restriction of international trade / loss of trade agreements Y
Increased isolationism Y
Rising internal violence Y
Excessive spending on military / arms race Y
Inability to maintain the currency - hoarding / devaluation / hyper inflation Y
If a majority of things on the list happen to a civilisation simultaneously, it is invariably the end for that civilisation. If all happen at the same time, it's guaranteed to be the end. The USSR collapsed with 9 out of the 18.
America scores 18/18. And you have reached "cascading interconnected systems failure" - everything is broken and everything you need to fix it is also broken.
The only question left is can you MANAGE the collapse? Will it be like the end of the British Empire - or Yugoslavia 1992 with way more guns.
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Capitalism is inherently self-cannibalising - you won't like it, but Marx pointed this out 150 years ago. Just cos you dont like Marx does not mean he was wrong, and sadly for the west, he was right. Capitalism is a funnel that steadily moves wealth to the top. When it has emptied out the working class it starts on the middle class. unless you heavily tax the top and spend the money at the bottom the system LITERALLY runs out of money to function - and this is the USA 2022 with the Fed printing money to keep the system functioning.
Americans voted for tax cuts for 40 years and that has allowed the money to be vacuumed up by the top 1% - 3 people have the same wealth as the bottom 50% - the SYSTEM DOES NOT HAVE THE MONEY TO CONTINUE FUNCTIONING.
The solution for each president "print money" and kick the can down the road till after the next election when its not my problem.
- so no, I'm not young, I'm old and this is my job, analysing how civilisations collapse and how people contribute to that and react to it.
my next book "how to cope in a collapsing society" will be out this year - you should keep an eye out for it.
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@Rose-hx9vk - Exactly - I did not say "all republicans are bad people" - Not ALL republicans are bad people. But the Republican party has a near-monopoly on truly bad people. Its self selecting. And its NOT just the Republican party. The right-wing party in any country has a near-monopoly of terrible people. There is even an experiment that proves this.
The Child In The Well Experiment
Mencius (fourth century BCE) was a Confucian philosopher. He proposed that all humans were inherently good. They all has “sprouts” of goodness, they just needed nurturing.
To demonstrate this he proposed the following. A young child is sat on a well, as you want by it falls screaming down the well. He says EVERYONE would run to help the child, call for help.
Recently this was tested. Subjects were taken to a room in a different city and there was a video screen of the space outside and it shows a well with a child on it. The subjects don't know this is a a pre recorded video, they think it is a live feed. As the “experiment” is being set up the child falls screaming down the well.
The theory is that 100% of people will react and call the assistant to go help the child.
This is not the case. 80% do exactly that, they go nuts and scream for help, run out the room to try and save the child, just what you would expect.
20% do NOTHING. They don't call for help, they don't get up and try to help and a significant proportion don't even register any facial emotions. They just passively watch a child die as if they were watching a commercial for shampoo.
Upon further investigation, the vast majority - close to 90% - of these that don't react are right wing to far right wing in their political views.
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A sociopath, a narcissist, a psychopath is hardly likely to be drawn to the "let's be nice to everyone" party are they???
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@Rose-hx9vk - No you have been extremely polite, exemplary. If I am a little short and snappy please forgive me. I am 250 miles south west of Odessa - the scene of some of the worst fighting in Ukraine; life is incredibly stressful here at the moment.
NO high taxes are not the answer, they are PART of the answer - but you actually mentioned the answer in your reply. EDUCATION. Almost ALL problems in society can be solved with education. And if you want to rob a society you first have to make it dumb.
I wrote this a few weeks ago:
In the late 1970's and early 80's computers became a thing and you could process lots of statistical data for the first time. And the political parties did... The data showed the GOP they would be demographic-ed out of existence in a couple of decades. It also showed the GOP that stupid badly educated people - amazingly - voted for them. Voted AGAINST their own interests, as blue-collar workers and for the GOP.
So the GOP started to breed their own supporters. They systematically defunded education - in 1976 education was 5.7% of GDP. In 1983 it was 3.4% Some of the specific changes they made were to STOP teaching critical thinking skills, skills that ALLOW people to spot a lie. And it was wildly
successful. America now has an uneducated subclass of 35% idiots and it is enough to swing elections.
BTW - I dont blame the Republicans. Its the GOP's job to move towards fascism and the Democrat's job to move towards socialism and its each other's job to stop it from happening. The Democrats totally sold out the working people of America and allowed the GOP to move so far to the right they have essentially lost their minds.
Its the Democrats that failed America and allowed this to happen by being pathetically weak sellouts.
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I am - for want of a better phrase - a communist. I arrived in Bulgaria a foaming at the mouth capitalist and made millions of dollars selling Bulgarian cosmetics to people in America. But I was not happy, what is the point of a system that takes the money needed to live from thousands and gives it ot a few who dont need it and it does not even make them happy...
I suffered brain damage in a mugging and lost everything - I was homeless for a while and learned to live on next to nothing, I was way happier than I was when rich. I realised what people need is rich fulfilling lives not rich with money lives.
It was the fruit trees that made me a communist - everyone in my city gets 4 months of limitless FREE FRUIT cos there are thousands of fruit trees. Why - free fruit for the people and I thought OH MY GOD, you can actually design and build a society FOR THE PEOPLE...
You dont have to build it for profit, there IS a different way to do it.
So Im not a "Tanki" I don't want Soviet era communism, but I want a society that is built for THE PEOPLE, and one that does not rely on endless growth that the planet can not sustain - that would be good.
Sorry for the long posts.
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@Rose-hx9vk - The Russian army is so totally hollowed out by corruption that it is utterly collapsing. One of the most visible examples are the tires on the truck, they are a Chinese FAKE version of a Michelin tire and they are no more than a movie prop. They will last a maximum of a month on the road and an hour off-road before they explode. There are videos of trucks driving along with the 4 back tires ALL blown out. Apparently, the Chinese fake version costs $500 and the original Michelin version $15,000 - the $14,500 difference paid for some oligarchs yacht.
For the first time today, I had a tiny hope that Russia might just straight up LOSE the war.
Tomorrow I am taking about 6 big bags of clothes and blankets to the Red Cross for the refugees that are starting to arrive in our city now.
Education - my education was based on critical thinking. We had to work everything out from first principles. At the beginning of the pandemic, I started a university degree on Ancient Chinese Philosophy. It was entirely geared around you passing the exam at the end of each week NOT on understanding or learning about philosophy. AT the end of the first year I had passed the exams but I knew nothing so I gave up - I was not interested in a certificate, I w3anted to UNDERSTAND Chinese philosophy and that is not what the course was about.
Communism - when you talk to people who lived under communism, its not so much an extreme political ideology as we see it in the west. Its a different way of structuring society. Where I live in Bulgaria, most people want to go back to communism who lived under it. In Romania next door it was a living hell. Communism wasn't a monoblock like we think of it, it was very varied. some places were really really good and others were like prison camps.
We were only told the prison camp version.
Emotionally Weak - hahahha - people see the fight and the courage of the Ukrainians and they are shocked, Im not. We had 100% mask compliance here, no one complained, no one protested, no one got their feelings hurt, no one has a months-long tantrum and I am sure it was the same in Ukraine. People in the west have had so little REAL to complain about for so long [as a society] that they fixate on the tiny things like having to wear a mask. Its the end of the world. After the USSR collapsed people starved to death in Eastern Europe - that was only 30 years ago. My friend Gia was sex trafficked by the Mafia in 2005, she escaped.
No one here complained about having to wear a mask.
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