I think d_r is a doctrinaire Commie, which his why his feelings were so hurt by telling it like it is about Karl Marx. Fustakrakich is some kind of a burnout spitballer, who just likes to poke people. A lapsed Catholic, I think.

No, seriously. Postmodernism makes everything a social construct. It's all appeal to the flesh; all about stirring hormones; all about burning the culture for political power.

Just about anything can be rationalized.

I never knew that; probably due to the Zero Positive Catholic News rule.

Sure. d_r is a commie; fustakrakich is a troll.

OK

The Left has been told There Is No Truth.

No, it's a function of organizational behavior. The least-worst thing to do is implement the minimal set of rules required, and change out the people in charge of monitoring them quite regularly.
And, while no raging fan of Rome's bureaucracy, I haven't ever met a monk or priest that wasn't a walking copy of the Beatitudes.

Microsoft didn't fire its entire IT department. Disney did. They are a stark example of fuck-you-ism and the lie behind the H1B expansion, the fabrication that they can't find qualified workers so they need indentured labor from abroad. Here they are saying, we just don't want to pay local rates, so fuck you, America!.

Capital is so overwhelmingly victorious that they aren't bothering to pretend it's about worker shortages anymore. They don't give a flying fuck about their country; they believe their only responsibility is to make money. They are wrong; corporations are government creatures, not private entities. They've no existence other than governmental laws that grant them their superpowers. That existence comes with requirements, and one of those requirements is that they exist for the good of the country that was gracious enough to let them enjoy their legal immunity and ability to print money. The idea they have no other god but money is their own notion, brought into law by their own lobbying efforts, and it is wrong. They have obligations to their community to provide jobs, to obey laws about the effects of their pollution, and in other respects act like the human beings they bought laws to say that they are. You want power? You also get responsibility. Right now they get the former and dismiss the latter.

The seed was planted decades ago when we decided not to publically fund political campaigns and instead left it to private donations. Soooooo, corporations are people, money is speech, speech is unlimited, money is unlimited, congress and Presidents can't be elected without enormous private wealth donating to their elections, so inevitably rich corporations bought the country. Rather cheaply.

Fix? Eliminate private financing of elections. No PACs. No backdoor corporate campaigns. No money whatsoever necessary to run for office. Free access to the internet for speeches and such, but no cute games with fake personas and perception management. And oh, yes, set the computerized election counting machines on fire, because you ^&%(##s, there is NO WAY they will let the vote go so overwhelmingly against them if they can simply tweak the elections results. Canada manually counts paper ballots in less than four hours. An elections system you cannot understand, own, or deconstruct is a system that is designed to hide cheating.

Sounds like we have a consentus. Too bad it's about 15 years too late, but let's clean up the fragments of what we had and try to move on without the semi-slave labor.

Except that the problem already happened, and is happening. The wars, the pollution, the animal die-off, the climate change, ther rising oceans, even the srrveillance (why that is is too long to go into) is caused by reaction to: too damned many people. The slack off in population growth did not happen. China has dropped the ball and is now shooting towards three billion. The brakes will go on, one way or another, by the Four Horseman method or the by the new fifth Horseman named Intelligence riding his pink unicorn, but the catastrophe is ON and will be ongoing for a very, very long time.

Population growth always outgrows resources, if unchecked. That is mathematics.

I agree about resource management. Even Heinlein agreed that it was poor management that caused poverty, even during overpopulation emergencies. However, and this is important, the type of management necessary is 180 degrees opposed to the type of government and libertarian business philosophy we are committed to. The management would have to be absolute and need overwhelming power over private interests, so we can't. We can't even build trains overland because the people who own the land want too much cash to make it affordable. We can't make people stop taking long showers during a drought emergency. We're not capable of submitting to an authority that would require sacrifices from us.

"Once people get a little bit of education and the ability to enjoy leisure time, they funnily enough stop having kids."

A stunning example (to me) Mexico. Super Catholic. Yet their insane population growth has abruptly dropped to 2 kids a family, in one generation. Damn. All it took was a little more money than utter poverty wages, exposure to outside ideas, and people fixed their own problem (in Mexico, that problem is overpopulation, over and out).