The White privilege to terrorize

mooray said:

More so in the past, less so today. We have the ability to wreck a shit-ton of countries and steal their resources, but...mostly...choose not to. We'd look like giant assholes and the loss from sanctions would be far greater than the benefits of whatever it is we could steal. There's something to be said having little worth taking.

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I suggest that technology directly supports our choosing not to. Specifically communications technology. Do anything big, and the world knows about it in minutes. The powers on the other side of the treaty know it sooner. Their intelligence services are heavily invested in secure communications.
Our looking like giant jerks would be an immediate consequence of the technically-enabled transparency.

As for little worth taking, Africa has massive untapped natural resources, including strategic minerals like tantalum and cobalt and REE elements. Thus China building a basis of treaties and contracts which gives them an edge in obtaining these resources.

That's not taking though, that's just a mutually satisfactory agreement between two nations.

mooray said:

That's not taking though, that's just a mutually satisfactory agreement between two nations.

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China's contracts tend to be neither symmetrical nor equitable. So I don't accept mutually satisfactory.

Signing something under pressure, and the Chinese are masters of subtle coercion, is not mutually agreeable.

I had a feeling it'd go this way. Ultimately, the existence of these arrangements is proof of satisfaction, because the agreements will either change, or evaporate, once they become truly dissatisfactory. Everyone puts their positives and negatives on a scale and the agreements happen or don't happen when one outweighs the other. There's not really anything else you can do.

mooray said:

I had a feeling it'd go this way. Ultimately, the existence of these arrangements is proof of satisfaction, because the agreements will either change, or evaporate, once they become truly dissatisfactory. Everyone puts their positives and negatives on a scale and the agreements happen or don't happen when one outweighs the other. There's not really anything else you can do.

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Afghanistan's current happenings are a powerful counterexample. The scales are not even. I don't share your concept of anyone in a contractual bond to China being treated as an equal.

Technically, it's your concept. I never said anything about equality.

mooray said:

Technically, it's your concept. I never said anything about equality.

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I am beginning to conclude that you do not know how language works. You said it here. An even scale (balance is the correct term. Scales are for fish and music) is implicit in the choice of the word outweigh. I tire of conversing with people who use sloppy language to keep distorting the argument.

mooray said:

I had a feeling it'd go this way. Ultimately, the existence of these arrangements is proof of satisfaction, because the agreements will either change, or evaporate, once they become truly dissatisfactory. Everyone puts their positives and negatives on a scale and the agreements happen or don't happen when one outweighs the other. There's not really anything else you can do.

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It just means that to those involved, what you have to give, is worth what you get, that's it. Not really any different from any other decision in life. Trade exists specifically because someone needs something more than they need the thing they have and that's two parties with two different perceptions of value of what they have and what they want. It doesn't matter what some thirty party nonparticipant spectator thinks about it, like you or I, because all we'd be doing is projecting our own valuations into someone else's transaction.

Just going to add a comment about how I'm feeling about our back and forth. It's really easy to overlook communication imperfections when your goal is to simply understand the general point being made. And if your goal were to seek conflict, then it's really easy to find those imperfections and focus on those. My gut says that for whatever reason, you're irked with me and are doing the latter.

Obepawn said:

Some of us.

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Hasn't the money you've made in at least some of your jobs been extracted from people even if they preferred not to use your service?

I'd say those people might fit in your "some of us".

That’s not the part I’m taking about. You said in many ways, many of us are more enslaved now than we were 200 years ago. I reply, some of us.

Unless you’ve had your children ripped from your arms and sold, comparing anything like taxation or vaccine mandates to slavery just makes you look like a stupid motherfucker.

CunningCanuk said:

Unless you’ve had your children ripped from your arms and sold, comparing anything like taxation or vaccine mandates to slavery just makes you look like a stupid motherfucker.

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Unless you are an even stupider than stupid motherfucker you would note I said "in many ways".

That qualifier seems to have escaped your observation.

Obepawn said:

That’s not the part I’m taking about. You said in many ways, many of us are more enslaved now than we were 200 years ago. I reply, some of us.

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So, should people today get instant "carryover oppression credit" if their ancestors were enslaved ?

Could you expand on what you meant when you said "some of us" ? I'm genuinely interested in line of reasoning.

In many ways, just not the main significant way that makes it most offensive.

More like in the...ancillary thread the needle to create a loose theoretical connection for the purpose of giving way more impact than it should.

CunningCanuk said:

Unless you’ve had your children ripped from your arms and sold, comparing anything like taxation or vaccine mandates to slavery just makes you look like a stupid motherfucker.

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Are you saying that children aren't stolen from parents today by government ?

mooray said:

In many ways, just not the main significant way that makes it most offensive.

More like in the...ancillary thread the needle to create a loose theoretical connection for the purpose of giving way more impact than it should.

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I appreciate your having a reasonable tone in most of your replies, whether I agree with them or not.

Rob Roy said:

I appreciate your having a reasonable tone to most of your supplies, whether I agree with them or not.

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Well, if you're saying that because of the other response you got, c'mon now, that's a pretty ridiculous angle. You're very well aware that kids cannot care for themselves and you understand the role of a guardian and you know that 99.99% of the time when a kid is taken away, in no moral or legal sense is it theft. And you're doing the binary thing again using the 0.01% when kids are taken without good cause and you're manipulating that into the dominant example. It's exactly what Maher was talking about recently with making arguments in good faith.

mooray said:

Well, if you're saying that because of the other response you got, c'mon now, that's a pretty ridiculous angle. You're very well aware that kids cannot care for themselves and you understand the role of a guardian and you know that 99.99% of the time when a kid is taken away, in no moral or legal sense is it theft. And you're doing the binary thing again using the 0.01% when kids are taken without good cause and you're manipulating that into the dominant example. It's exactly what Maher was talking about recently with making arguments in good faith.

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Well that actually adds to my point. Thank you. Today's slavery is more of a death of a thousand cuts, which is my point.

Aren't well over .01% of children taken by the government? Yes, they are.

What would you call compulsory government schools ? I'd call it one of the deeper cuts.

To ignore the cumulative result of all those cuts, incrementally more each year has brought us to the present form of slavery.

I could expound, but you appear capable of deducing my point.

It's perfectly legal to home school your kids. Ours was from 2nd grade through HS graduation. They try hard to "stick to the facts" so the RR's out there don't get all spun up. I think that if you object to math and science and history and literature, then you're in effing lala land and Natural Light is probably your main form of daily nutrition.

Yes, you are not 100% free, but you're nowhere near a "slave" either and you throw out a serious word while undermining many people's hard life experiences like it's effin candy and you shit on them when you do that.

mooray said:

It's perfectly legal to home school your kids.

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That's reflected in their oxymoronic property taxes by a corresponding drop right? Of course not.

Your point doesn't rise to a refutation, I'd even say it's not a very good deflection.