How the middle has fallen out of American politics
Like a soggy taco, the bottom has fallen out of America politics. The left and right are going hard while the middle has gone soft. The ‘middle’ was hypocrisy and lies, but it was still the only thing holding the taco together. Now the whole thing is falling apart.
The…
Money printer go brrrrr
Crypto is just the idea that ‘hey, if those fuckers can make up money, so can we.’ That’s all it is. It’s a new set of elites minting coins. Instead of being backed by guns, they’re backed by computers. Does this solve any of the climate-destroying problems of capitalism? No…
Chinese Democracy Part II
This is a Part II. Part I is more general philosophy here.
I grew up thinking that democracy was A) a thing and B) a good thing. but none of this is true. Democracy is many things, none of them inherently good. …
Chinese Democracy (Part I)
I’ve been reading writers in China and they talk about democracy a lot. These are mainstream, mainland writers. These aren’t dissidents, they’re deciders. For example, this is from Wang Huning, a member of the Politburo:
The overall goal of China’s political system reform is to follow the world trend of…
Don’t worry about capitalism collapsing, just look at these dumb darkies!
My friend Amita Arudpragasam wrote an article in Foreign Policy called How to End Sri Lanka’s Food Crisis. I know Amita and like her very much, but I’m afraid I must go hard here because the article is very wrong. I will attack the piece based on three core assumptions…
How China grew faster and longer than any country in human history
If you read The Economist you get the sense that China just copied western capitalism. If you read economic history, however, that’s not what happened at all.
China developed precisely because they didn’t just copy capitalist theories wholesale. After leaping into Soviet communism, they didn’t just undertake a ‘Great Leap…
Education has created a modern caste system
Education is supposed to be a social ladder, but it’s fallen over and turned into a cage. Some kids can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and it all comes out cleanly laundered as a degree. Some kids can’t and they get told it’s their fault, that they’re just dumb.
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It’s just taking history a while to write it down
Varys said “power resides where men believe it resides.” That’s why Bin Laden attacked the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and narrowly missed the Capitol. He attacked American financial, military, and political power right where it lives. And two out of three, he hit.
20 years after 9/11, the Americans…
You’re in the jungle, baby, you’re gonna die
Wild animals get eaten alive, or dead if they’re lucky. We like to think we’re better than that, that we’re civilized, but we’re just animals with airs. We’ve barely advanced since we started throwing dirt over our dead 100,000 years ago. We still treat our living like shit.
Today people…
From orality to literacy and back again
This is a lecture I gave to a group of young people in a political training academy we run in Sri Lanka.
Humans have communicated for hundreds of thousands of years. Most of that communication was NOT through social media, TV, or even writing. …
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Indi Samarajiva is a writer living in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Sign up for my newsletter at www.indi.ca, and you can reach me at indi@indi.ca.
