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 West’. Instead, they studied, they debated, and they applied markets to their own context, within their own strategic goals. They gradually experimented their way forward, one step at a time. And it worked.
As Branko Milanović said, China’s economic reforms “set the stage for the fastest and longest growth in…
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.
We are a gaslit generation, told that class and caste are our fault, that money is merit, that grades make inequality fine. Feudalism was at least honest about the class system. The myth of capitalism is that class doesn’t even exist. But of course it does. Just look at our…
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 finished the job. Trump hit what Bin Laden missed, inciting an attack on the Capitol. His mob killed and burnt their way inside, even smearing shit on the floor. This wasn’t an external attack anymore. The barbarians were inside the gates.
External attack, internal revolt, over-extended military? We’ve seen this…
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 are eaten alive by poverty. Predator drones devour us from the air. Children, the elderly, the sick, the disabled, they all get picked off at the edge of herd immunity. We even keep human beings in cages. And we call this a civilization? It’s just a jungle, capitalized.
Welcome To The Jungle
Welcome to…
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. It is important to understand this deep history of communications to understand anything today.
In this article we will talk briefly about four stages of human communication.
- Ritual
- Talking
- Writing
- Talking Again
1. Ritual
What’s the oldest communication? What’s older than all literature, art, and stories? What has communicated across billions of people and hundreds of thousands of…
You don’t need to be rich, famous, or powerful to be happy. You just need enough
When you hear about someone famous or rich you think “oh they must be happy, I’d be happy if I was like that.” But are they? Rich and famous people don’t seem more happy than anybody else. Often less. Whatever they have, it doesn’t seem to work, or at least it wears off.
When I was young I thought I wouldn’t be complete without power but now I’m generally powerless and it feels fine. I have some marginal control over a Beagle and avoid most oppression and this is more than enough. …
And it’s just gotten started
We live in interesting times. As the saying goes, it’s a curse. In the 21st century, the post-war order is breaking down, America has lost its goddam mind, and we’re sailing into climate change like a bat into hell. God knows we need a change, but that god is Shiva The Destroyer. This century is going to suck.
The Post World War II Disorder
What we call a post-war order is actually the shrapnel of World War II, loosely duct-taped together. Now that’s all coming apart.
The first thing to understand is that World War II didn’t end in 1945, it just ended for white people…
The rise and fall of America in one generation. Mine
I grew up in America at the end of history, in the 1990s. The Cold War was over, Vietnam was past. Civil Rights were won and World War II was long gone. Nobody even remembered the last pandemic. America had won or at least survived it all. Last man standing, the last man of history. Francis Fukuyama called it The End Of History and it really felt like that. I was there and it was fucking boring. We lit fires and did drugs to pass the time.
In just 30 years, however, history has violently restarted and America has lost…
School is a screen for children like mine. For others it’s a wall
My daughter started school today, in the TV room. The dog was there, trying to eat her crayons. I was there, fending off the dog and working the mute button. When a pandemic goes endemic, this is what academics looks like. A five-year-old spends her first day of school not going to school at all.
It’s bad… but it’s not all bad. It’s definitely not good.
Bad
The bad is that virtual school is not school. You can’t just drop the kids off and trust that they’ll take it from there. They can’t just sit down, listen, and get herded to…
Just follow the money
America has a case of capitalism so bad it’s literally killing them. They’re so violently ill that it’s killing everyone. America has a terminal case of capitalism. Just look at their charts.
First healthcare:
Life
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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.
