True, media weaponized. It serves as conditioning for the majority of passive participants through the planet. The individualist, the apolitical, the apathetic, the “I choose not to participate in political discussion”, all programmed into the media, social or otherwise. In exchange for this passivity there is the sense of control, “I can rub my screen and get things done, because I am a smart android user”. I wonder if there is a joke about it being called android.

If conditions in the US force people to behave a certain way, the rest of the world will pretend they are American as well. So you have people in india on a 50cc scooter double up, waiting for an order of fries to share, in the drive through of Indian McD. They feel like Liam Nieson for a moment.

People sitting in a corner passing out a political leaflet? Pathetic losers. The world wants to be on the side of winners for a change, since everything else in their life is turning to shit.

The sad part is left wing minded progressive social psychologists did studies to provide this system with tools to manipulate people.

I think this talk calls for more theoretical analysis of what this “US” really is, which I believe is much more complex than just another capitalist state.

I think there are layers of what the US really is. There is a “low layer” of a government regulating and managing people within its borders, just like all others. There is US capital where the prime actors are actually based, living, operating from the US, and there is capital managed by US financial institutions but for actors outside the US. In general the vast majority of global capital is somehow linked with US based financial institutions (industry, energy, transportation, commodities, communication -capital) and those fin.inst. act as a lobby to the US governement to have as a priority to protect their interests globally.

This later part appeals to a layer of the US as “defense” which has little to do with internal/border defense but is a global capital defense mechanism. This layer and the other local/internal layer are not really connected or in coordination with each other.

Then there is the US as people, a country geared and operating as to constantly be overproducing an army to serve this external army layer. It is almost as if the only reason the US exists is as a producer of military personnel, and the rest of society is just a necessary evil for producing such an army. The rhetoric of nationalism, the love of the flag, the religious connection between god and America (capitalism against the evil of communism) is all connected to this industrialized soldier manufacturing plant.

If you think of all other social policy of the US this model explains education, health, transport, construction, media. It is a big base and some people outside the base supporting those on the base.

Otherwise adorable hardworking people doing what they were taught to do best. So when we speak of the US we should specify what aspect and layer of the US are we speaking about.

Now wait a damn minute. It is not just the working class that owes loans for schooling, one may say the lowest economic class in the US made the least use of student loans, it is the middle class that benefitted the most. Kids that got out of public school and went straight to work, either in factory, construction, etc. made very little use of those loans. On the other hand some who did get loans may have used them as capital to escape work and are now well off, just didn’t feel like paying.

The populist right invested in this reality and got a significant part of the real working class who never saw a student loan to “rightfully” say if you are going to donate 30-50.000 to others why not give me just as much too?

The neoliberal nightmare (Biden) as brother/comrade Manning Marable called him (in contradiction to the “neo-fascist disaster” Trump) invested in appealing to this lower middle class of managerial stuff and their kids, to give them a gift so he can get elected. And he did probably on this promise for a gift himself. He may have known it wouldn’t legally make it all the way so it was a cheap promise to make. Who knows what’s next from this war-monger constitution abolitionist (covid violations of constitutional human rights).

The 1.2 trillion of fake dollars printed and distributed wasn’t illegal, corporations sucked it all up, but loan wavers are, because they are not for everyone’s benefit.

EDIT: To go to a short term trade school to get a license or certificate within months (such as CDL driver’s license) only costs a few thousands in loans and mostly the payments of were made sortly after by an employer. To go through university and graduate education loans could easily reach 50+ k$, for which an MBA could graduate, start an Inc. consulting/accounting/financing and as a person can have unpaid loans while their business could be bringing millions. Truck driver got 3000, and it was paid 6-9mos after first job. Golf-club life member owes $100k with penalties and interest and doesn’t care, it was government guaranteed and nobody is chasing to throw him in prison.

swiftessay: undefined> They are much more focused on ritual, on human connection, on sociality, and experience of the divine. And those things aren’t at all incompatible with a thoroughly materialistic view of how the sensible world works.

Human connection, sociality (I’d say you mean socialization) are very much material, and so is behavior, communication, etc. The “experience of the divine” is beyond those, and you seem to want to mix things in order to connect them. How does one who is not a metaphysical believer exeperience the divine? If there is such divine how does it relate and affect our material existence?

I know it is very mechanistic as is our understanding of the material world though science. Science, begins with certain axioms, assumptions if you will, and builds up on those in a rational way for which you can backtrack back to the assumptions at any point you are in doubt. Just to see if you have made an error somewhere in the “line” of thought and end up with incorrect conclusions.

With metaphysical thought of any religion, eastern western, northern, southern, there is no such sequence, things are all over the place and not necesseraly need a connection.

The Christian religion you attribute to European origin, may have spread through Europe initially, but it is just a fork of a middle eastern religion, Judaism in specific. So is islam, an non-European religion, also a fork of Judaism, Historically and archaeologically it is hard to separate Judaism from the Greek times and language, in which rationalism and materialism is born, and on top of this philosophical base science and methodology. The religious claims may be going back thousands of years but the scripts in their earliest found and mentioned references data back to Hellenistic times. Jesus comes 7 centuries after Heraclitus wrote, whose writings were available and are referenced by others in the library of Alexandria which christian clergy says were destroyed.

To be a scientist or attempt to be scientific and serve metaphysical beliefs at the same time, if nothing else, to me it indicates mental contradiction and discomfort. If the metaphysical can not have any relation to anything physical/natural/material process or condition, why bother with it? It doesn’t belong in this universe and in this physical life and presence. Why would illusion be necessary to a someone in search for material reality, in order to know what to do to change it, or improve it? It can only be an obstacle.

Is it because some religion serve as providing a social contract under which people are expected to behave against each other? We can do this by other agreements, social, political, legal. To maintain a social contract in fear of the metaphysical consequence is just a way to terrorize and manage humans to control them, with ultimate political and economic benefits of doing so.

It is incomprehensible for me how can one be both a communist and have a religious affiliation, or any form of metaphysical thought. I am very respectful usually of people with faith but not as communists at the same time.

Please help me understand, I am too dumb when it comes to this.

Carters’ peanuts :)

Nutritious is very relative to industrialized food production. The most nutritious natural products are perceived as wild and are not objects of agriculture. Basically the objects of agriculture were selected on the ease of reproduction, not their nutritious value, or their cost. It just so happened that those that were easy to plant and grow were the leanest in quantity and complexity of nutrients. Many of the most nutritious seeds, fruits, and vegetables are becoming extinct with the elimination of natural forests. Planted forests would take thousands of years to stabilize as ecosystems (if ever) and be concidered sustainable food sources.

Cheap means the industry hasn’t been able to monopolize, but labor is very exploitable (see bannana republics, tea and coffee plantations). It also means the quantities produced have saturated the markets and the product is in abundance (wheat, corn, soy,…).

Delicious … only N.Europeans (and their N.Am. Oceania descendants) would consider eating a single element alone and judge it by taste. The rest of the world eat what they can get, spice it up, mix it, and make taste a final product of a mixture of things with a labor intensive process of preparing it. The dairy industry (waste of nutritients and exponentially waste of land use) and the sugar industry (it should have been banned under substance abuse addictive product that is a health hazzard as well) have blurred what “delicious” really means. Take as an example banana split ice cream, there is little nutritious value, if not harmful as a whole, made of three industrial products that maximize labor exploitation. If it wasn’t for capitalism nobody in their right mind would have come up with this one. It only exists because of capitalism.

Nutrition has been a dead end disaster since its early days of being industrialized.