It was only 2018 when Apple first attained a $1T Market cap.
I remember in 2014 when Silicon Valley had over 100 startups valued at $1B or more. We called them "unicorns". Uber was the first decacorn. I guess that would make Anthropic a kilocorn.
>A government is just a corporation with a bit more power than the others, not some sacred entity that sits above us.
Well yes, a government doesn't need to be sacred to sit above you, it need only have more power. It's legitimacy is conditional on maintaining a monopoly on violence.
If we’re going to descend into pedantry, my statement was normative, not descriptive, as in “I agree this is what a government does, I disagree this is what it _should_ do”.
“Beneath me” is _my_ value judgement that I pass on this government and its appendages as in “it has been weighed in the balance and has been found unworthy”. That this government has more power than me doesn’t make it sit above me as a moral absolute, and it doesn’t magically give it legitimacy.
The government sits above you because it makes you do things under the threat of violence. Why do you stop at the stop sign? because the government reserves the right to hurt you if you don't.
The government's legitimacy comes from it's stick being bigger than yours. It's not sacred, it's not magic. It's a bigger stick. Your value judgement would have weight if your stick was bigger. The guy with the bigger stick decides what you (or Jack Ma) is worthy of.
> The government's legitimacy comes from it's stick being bigger than yours
By the same argument, are Somalian warlords and Mexican drug cartel also legitimate in the territories they control? I don't think "legitimate" is the word you are looking for to describe pure power dynamics, since "legitimate" is imbued with a moralistic judgement (look up is vs ought etc.). But yes, in practice, if I have a gun pointed at my head, I could be forced to do things that go against my judgement (within limits!).
The history of civilization is warlords showing up and saying "Give me 2 bags of wheat from each crop and I won't kill you. Not only that, once I own you, I will fight to make sure the other ensure the other guy can't steal you from me, and that you remain productive."
So long as the warlord can make good on that agreement, you have political order. Over time many abstractions emerge, but backing it all up is the big stick. Now, I'm with you, from a moral standpoint it's all abhorrent. As an anarchist I view civilization to be a hack on the human condition, and I see all states as fundamentally authoritarian.
So it's all just game theory to me. China blocked the Manus acquisition as a matter of national interest. The US also ignores international law on matters on national interest at its own convenience.
If a law is unenforceable is it really a law? Anybody can declare a law. It is only meaningful if it can be enforced.
There are regions of Mexico where cartels hold the monopoly on violence, and the longer they maintain that control the more legitimate they become.
> As an anarchist I view civilization to be a hack on the human condition, and I see all states as fundamentally authoritarian.
I think we are not really in disagreement, it's mainly an argument over the semantics of "legitimate" at this point :) Rousseau and Hobbes were both right.
Luckily china has a litany of 3rd world countries land borders surrounding it with porous borders, and in a great deal of them no one who gives too many shits about some poor chinese villager crossing. Americans on the other hand have Canada which for LEO purposes is basically an extension of the US, and Mexico which due to the drug trade and other unique factors mean anyone getting caught jumping the border in either direction is likely to owe the cartel a massive amount of money or some extremely undesirable favors.
I would definitely rather be a trapped Chinese trying to escape than a trapped American.
Surveillance in the PRC is massive and centralized. There's a reason NK fleeing into the PRC plummeted when the PRC decided to stop turning a blind eye.
A valid point. Although PRC citizens have a little easier time explaining why they are in the PRC than North Koreans, and there are hundreds of miles of sparse Chinese border area where no one even knows where China starts/ends and where Pakistan or India begins. Out of places where there is a known border, Myanmar for instance is infamous for porosity.
The reason why NK have stopped is largely either NK enforcement or being caught while in the PRC without permission to reside in the PRC. Both of which are highly mitigated for PRC citizen (PRC citizens can have issues spending time in cities they're not authorized to live in, but less so with merely "visiting" countryside).
All states, by definition, are authorities that demand compliance. You're not saying anything that distinguishes Jack Ma's condition from anyone else's just about anywhere.
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing
I think I can speak for most people with niche subjects of interest when I say that the commonly held beliefs on said niche subject tend to be pretty bad.
Tulsa once had what was known as Black Wall Street. There were too many successful black men, so 1921 in the whites massacred everybody. They even brought in planes and dropped bombs.
Here's a contemporary opinion, from the state attorney general at the time, the highest ranking person in a judicial apparatus that didn't prosecute anyone for participating in it. Looks like the fact that "the Negro" was so rich he didn't "accept the white man as his benefactor" was a pretty big deal...
The cause of this riot was not Tulsa. It might have happened anywhere for the Negro is not the same man he was thirty years ago when he was content to plod along his own road accepting the white man as his benefactor. But the years have passed and the Negro has been educated and the race papers have spread the thought of race equality.
There is no discussion of wealth in your quote. And further, that quote supports what I've been saying.
It specifically says "the cause of this riot was not Tulsa", and "It might have happened anywhere". If it "might have happened anywhere", it therefore has nothing to do with the unique high-wealth of this area.
Takes a lot of cognitive dissonance to unironically suggest that the axiomatic Southern racist belief that "the Negro" should regard "the white man as his benefactor" has no links to their relative wealth.
When you find yourself drawing parallels between your own arguments and those of contemporary white supremacists asserting that the attitudes of local whites were not at all to blame, it's perhaps a good idea to reconsider...
Wow. Your own quote validates what I'm saying, but regardless of your position that it isn't so...
Delving into "you're a racist if you don't agree with my take on this event" is a very, very scummy and morally bankrupt thing to do. Especially since you're literally making up that comparison, for nothing I've said indicates I absolved anyone of anything at all. In fact, I've been asserting that whites of the time didn't need a special reason, like wealth, to do what they did.
People asserting that wealth was required to cause this tragedy, are actually giving excuses as to why it happened. Racism doesn't require that.
Well, I am also having trouble with stating it as a fact, that the reason was they were too wealthy. Might have played a role later, but that is not clear to me from what is stated on wiki:
"The massacre began during Memorial Day weekend after 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a black shoeshiner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, a white 21-year-old elevator operator in the nearby Drexel Building.[25] He was arrested and rumors spread that he was to be lynched. Several hundred white residents assembled outside the courthouse, appearing to have the makings of a lynch mob. A group of approximately 50–60 black men, armed with rifles and shotguns, arrived at the jail to support the sheriff and his deputies in defending Rowland from the mob. Having seen the armed black men, some of the whites who had been at the courthouse went home for their own guns. There are conflicting reports about the exact time and nature of the incident, or incidents, that immediately precipitated the massacre.
According to the 2001 Commission, "As the black men were leaving, a white man attempted to disarm a tall, African American World War I veteran. A struggle ensued, and a shot rang out." Then, according to the sheriff, "all hell broke loose."[26] The two groups shot at each other until midnight when the group of black men was greatly outnumbered and forced to retreat to Greenwood."
So you take issue with the idea that an out of mob that burned down 35 blocks of a mid sized city was motivated by envy and resentment of the prosperous black community.
Instead, you assert it was a mob that assembled to lynch a young man who was arrested for assault after he stepped on the foot of or grabbed the arm of a white female elevator operator when he tripped in the elevator. I guess they got out of hand when there was resistance to their murdering the kid.
I take issue with the statement "There were too many successful black men" and wikipedia as proof for that.
Honest representation of facts is important to me in general.
"After an all-night battle on the Frisco Tracks, many residents of Greenwood were taken by surprise as bullets ripped through the walls of their homes in the predawn hours. Biplanes dropped fiery turpentine bombs from the night skies onto their rooftops—the first aerial bombing of an American city in history. A furious mob of thousands of white men then surged over Black homes, killing, destroying, and snatching everything from dining room furniture to piggy banks. Arsonists reportedly waited for white women to fill bags with household loot before setting homes on fire. Tulsa police officers were identified by eyewitnesses as setting fire to Black homes, shooting residents and stealing. Eyewitnesses saw women being chased from their homes naked—some with babies in their arms—as volleys of shots were fired at them. Several Black people were tied to cars and dragged through the streets."
---
"One kid groped another kid" is an insufficient explanation of this kind of violence and looting.
Oh it was becuase of their race for sure. For the type of man who joins a lynch mob, the only thing worse than a black man being black was him being “uppity”.
The black community resisted the lynching and stood up for the poor bastard they wanted to murder. Their prosperity as a community and individually gave them the fortitude to fight back.
It wasn’t “because they were rich”. It was because they had agency and dared to stand for their rights as a community. For a person who believes that the color of your skin makes you an inferior or superior human, that is an unforgivable affront.
you are incredibly naive, ignorant or oblivious if you dont think a primary reason was because of their race in TULSA in 1921. Cmon man -read some history
Your refusal to interact with subtext has me guffawing. I wonder if you even recognize what you're doing.
In the history of revolution, there is never (except in elementary school) all that much weight put on the singular act which instigated the final result. The conditions in place (Jim Crow laws, Southern pride, etc.) lead up to a final moment which our monkey brains like to point to as the cause but in reality there is a simmering cultural froth which could boil over in any number of ways: it just happens that one of the ways is what's described in the Wikipedia article, but it could have started many other ways. All of our understanding about the experience of being Black in the US during that time helps to contextualize the extreme and disproportionate outburst of violence by the White population as racially motivated, serving under an ideology best described as ur-"Great Replacement Theory".
In simpler words, the destruction of Black Wall Street is not without precedent, indeed this was merely one of the more famous and complete examples of destroying the wealth that Black people enjoyed, if only briefly due to the hate of those visiting violence upon them.
But you are doing the same as what you are complaining about.
Racism is a complex phenomenon not limited to the simplistic view "they don't like black people". This representation is doing a disservice when some truly racist people are then justifying their actions and beliefs by saying "I cannot be racist, I'm friend with the garbage man who is black: he is a good black man, is polite to me and stay at his place. So, if I'm not racist, what I'm doing is just legitimate".
In the context of Tulsa, it is difficult to believe that the frustration of racist people seeing black people more successful than them has not contributed to the situation. It seems very natural and logical (and that's even the core of "white supremacy": it clearly states that white people deserve a better position in the social hierarchy than black people: white supremacy framing is all about how some classes are reserved to white people and not black people), and if you are claiming that it is not the case, you are the one with the burden of the proof.
While you have a point on raising that racism should not be reduced to only a class issue, you should have raised that as a precision around the discussion instead of presenting it as if racism has absolutely nothing to do with class and class sentiment.
To take back your parallel, what you do can be seen as:
"A person entered a bar and was raped" (what you say)
vs
"A woman entered a bar and was raped". While nobody here claims that men cannot be raped, there is social phenomenon that create a gender imbalance, and it is important to not reduce the situation to "it has nothing to do with gender and the social norms around it".
In the rest of your comment, you, yourself, are doing a lot of interpretations. The fact that someone noticed that a class factor may have had an impact does not mean that they or all readers will conclude that it is the only way racism can happen (that is a huge stretch: if they know what happened at Tulsa, they very probably know a lot of other cases where the "only due to class" theory does not hold up).
Same for "victim blaming": the fact that they were successful were obviously not used to excuse the massacre or pretend that somehow it was the black people's fault, the context is clearly to condemn the white racist people (and the success of the black people seems to be presented as an obvious additional factor on the racists, as it is obviously unfair to pretend that some people don't have the right to be successful).
I think the first comment was not totally perfect and would have been 100% fine if they would have simply added "class was one of the factor". But I think your reaction has way more problems and does a bigger disservice by reducing racism to a framework that can easily be instrumentalised by real racist people.
It is not difficult to believe that the frustration of racist people seeing black people more successful contributed to it. In fact, it's the most obvious and straightforward explanation for it, given the fact that it's 1)1921, 4 or so decades before the Civil Rights act, and in freaking TULSA lmao
Would you feel bad if it was actually true? Would it pose even a minor inconvenience for your life if that was exactly the case? What's the problem anyway.
People died, yes. But there was no white supremacism. There was no Wall Street. It was just like any high street. It was triggered by an attempted rape.
People were murdered and homes and businesses destroyed by a white mob because they were black. How is that anything but white supremacy?
> There was no Wall Street. It was just like any high street.
It was one of the wealthiest black communities in america at a time. “Black wall street” was a nickname, not a literal description of a stock exchange.
> It was triggered by an attempted rape.
No, it was triggered by an attempted lynching of a black man. Or if you want to be more specific, because the community there stood up to protect the arrested man. It was triggered by a black community stopping a lynching.
Your assertions are an ahistorical revisionist fantasy.
Are we now not at all allowed to reference problems in other societies? We can complain about western society, and complaints from 100 years ago, when even my grandfather wasn't born yet, are valid criticism of America/Europe/... but things that happen today in India, Pakistan, Turkey are off limits?
No one did of course, but it's a common tactic of distraction to try to focus the attention on something else.
That way people don't have to experience the discomfort thinking about the negative thing going on in their own society.
We live in a society where nobody is starving to death, but also one where nobody lives forever. In between those polarities anything that one might deem a "positive contribution" is just about the feels.
All of this so-called progress we've made, all these efficiencies we've gained, and what do people want to do with their free time now that their needs are met? Nothing, they just work more.
We work more than we did when we were hunter gatherers, we're destroying the planet in the process, we're having less fun and we still don't live forever.
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