I mean America has plenty of industries the rest of the world depends on. Unfortunately, a lot of the good takes involve ignoring a lot of the bad ones that helped obtain them.
Don't be proud of your country, be proud of the societies you are willing to participate in and contribute towards. If you don't find yourself living inside a good one, go and search it out.
You fail to understand the difference between correlation and causation. That they have wealth and power is different from how it is used. Having said that, yeah, my definition is sort of different because I also consider the social bubble aspect that they live in (hence my Trump comment).
Let me ask you, what happens when your revolution is successful, and it is you that has wealth and power. It doesn't take a lot of imagination, the CCP is sort of this.
It all depends on the definition of class, and it is such an arbitrary one. What I meant was that if your definition is arbitrary enough, it tends to include a lot of false positives. There are a number of rich people who have said that they should be taxed more and have not shown any indication of contradicting themselves, for example.
Seems to be a bit of an obvious statement to make, but ok.
I have no problem with security cameras either. Asshole like Elon make a car with cameras, and suddenly the GDPR doesn't apply and judges switch to issuing subpoenas to their owners in case they might have caught a nearby crime instead of issuing fines.
Having some decent surveillance that you aren't an asshole with (hint: if you are using to track and profile people and you are the sort of person who likes to doxx, you probably are) brings ease of mind. You no longer have to suppose who or when some crime might have been committed, and even if it's not useful for catching them they can effectively help you make your prevention more effective. If governments cared about our security, they would just make sure they had no backdoors or mass surveillance capabilities, they would at least allow for personal, localized usage for our property a lot more.
Didn't know about the term sousveillance, that's awesome because that's what I've been arguing for all along.
Basically poisoning the well for augmented reality glasses.
The people who make those arguments are the sort who play en passant.
Even just from a practical point of view, this sounds like a horrible idea. The pilot is about the one thing you should not skimp on.
They aren't using "class", there is no such thing as "class", Trump is the biggest example of it - he has none, it's just a big scam to him. They are using wealth and power, but correlation does not imply causation, no matter how big that correlation may be.
Just seems to me you are redefining the middle class into the working class and are focusing on making the distinction be based on belonging to some arbitrary class. I don't even think the psychopaths we are referring to really care about belonging to anything if they can get ahead.
You can mobilize people, but if you are excluding people that could be included or trying to address what's actually an arbitrary definition, don't forget, there are psychopaths interested in taking you for a ride.
It's psychopaths succeeding for being psychopaths and not because they involve in some arbitrary concept of a class.
From my understanding, the pedophilia was used as a means, not the ends. They wanted to be influential, and trying to get socially awkward scientific leaders who probably didn't have great relationships with the opposite sex was probably particularly effective.
They tried to create an exclusive "social elite" men's club, using prostitution and pedophilia as their tools, and sure it's an example of misogyny and power imbalance, but frankly, I still wouldn't respect them if we flipped around the genders or evened them out. Science doesn't have an Epstein problem, it has a misogyny and power imbalance problem.
Maybe it also has a pedophilia and prostitution problem, but the article doesn't really explore that, it's just guilt by association. Which, fair enough, it's Epstein, but I doubt being as manipulative as they were that they tried to sell themselves the same to everybody.