Inequality results in higher asset prices. They commodified housing and allowed massive inequality. Now housing is expensive.

This happens because if you have more money than you can spend you start looking for things to buy. Houses and land, for instance. The neoliberal hope is that hoarded wealth will trickle down through investments. But there really isn’t enough money-making enterprise for the billions available, so rich folks start buying up assets, which become super expensive.

To be clear, I’m not saying there’s more money than can be wisely invested. I’m saying the money is concentrated (often into the hands of the least discerning) and not efficiently distributed for utilization. If normal folks had extra cash, they might start a small business, but billionaires aren’t looking to open a trattoria or book store. They don’t have time for such minutiae, so they buy up land or gold or get into crypto schemes or some harebrained bullshit.

This is absolutely amazing news!

States have no rights. People have rights.

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Russia’s favorite propaganda is to claim that democracy is impossible because state violence is universal. They don’t deny their own wrongdoing (the way China does): they embrace it with whataboutism.

Saying “all states are authoritarian” is meaningless. Of course all statehood is based in violence. Yet clearly citizens of Taiwan and China have different relationships with their governments.

To whit, I have no rights in China. They could disappear me for this one comment.

Tankies defend Russian and Chinese dictatorships in particular.

Interestingly, they don’t defend (and often even condemn) other dictatorships. This is a feature of their tribalistic ideology.

Having strong opinions about reforming vs overthrowing capitalism doesn’t make you a tankie. Defending Russian and Chinese totalitarianism certainly does.

it’s not “loyalties” but … the particular brand of propaganda people are getting.

State propaganda exists to engender loyalty to the regime. That’s the whole point.

They are quick to jump on any “western” wrongdoing, but equally quick to dismiss much worse from their own tribe. Because they are tribalists and nationalists who favor some nations over others — because they’re brainfucked by propaganda, as you said.

This obsession with east vs west is paradigmatic of tankie tribalist ideology. They can’t conceive of someone who doesn’t obsess over nationality or ethnic and cultural loyalties. Humans are humans. We should fight to be free from state oppression. Not complicated.

They’re not communists. They’re tankies: nationalistic authoritarians who defend police state brutality and “alternative facts” to spread disinformation courtesy of Russia and China. They’re obsessed with a west vs east dialectic.

Also, I don’t think you mean liberals strictly, but socialists — demsoc, socdem, anarchists, whatever.

Anarchists don’t respect nation states or arbitrary class divisions, which clashes hard with tankies’ rabid nationalism.

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