I think it’s cool: a country that grew from nothing into a vast empire

Huh???

It looked to me like America 200 years ago

Fucking what!!!

I wrote papers about China when I was still in primary school

Papers?? I assume he means something like ‘essays’, but from the rest of the interview I can easily imagine this person being arrogant enough to call a three-paragraph writing exercise he did when he was nine a “paper”.

Either way, his understanding clearly has not advanced since then. I’ve never seen someone (who wasn’t a paid propagandist) be so wrong, so succinctly about a country, especially one they supposedly lived in. This guy is a fucking idiot.

It’s free protest votes

It’s specific, but Quorn nuggets are objectively superior to chicken nuggets in every way.

Better taste, better texture, no gristle, easier to cook all the way through, zero (well okay, much less) chance of food poisoning.

Even if you’re not a vegetarian there’s simply no reason to eat chicken nuggets any more, they’re fully obsolete.

Absent Without Organic Life

They get allocated, reallocated, and spent elsewhere

They don’t. You can’t tag a particular dollar and follow it as it leaves a taxpayer’s account, goes into a government account, gets allocated to a particular item of the budget, and then gets spent out again into the economy. When a dollar is taxed, it basically goes into a furnace and disappears. Separately, dollars are conjured out of thin air and sent into the economy by the government.

The amount of dollars thrown in the furnace in a given day are tallied, sure. But that doesn’t determine the amount of dollars the government can create, it only informs it. The government can create as many dollars as it likes at will.

Millennium Challenge, the perfect dessert after a good meal

I hope someday an unexpected outburst from the barrel of a gun causes him to lose his life.

An illegal, unprovoked, full-scale attack!

Go woke or go broke

‘Stabbed in the back’ myth is evolving!

‘Stabbed in the back’ evolved into: ‘Stabbed in the back by Jews’!

Now Mount Rainier is decorated with combat veterans.

Egg fried rice, veggie spring rolls, egg fried rice, mixed vegetables in black bean sauce, egg fried rice, a big tub of sweet and sour sauce, some egg fried rice and another tub of sweet and sour sauce and some egg fried rice. And prawn crackers.

In addition to the answers already here, Southern slave plantation owners controlled the largest swathes of prime agricultural and cotton growing farmland. Almost the only cost of maintaining a slave is food and a little clothing, so as an industry the plantations were essentially self-sufficient just from their own produce. This meant that, as they were not paying money for food and clothing, they could keep prices for food and clothing high, draining money out of the industrializing North.

Capitalists, slightly contrary to other answers here, do actually need to pay their workers - at minimum - enough to reproduce their labor (at least until the extreme short-termism of neoliberalism arises) so high prices for food and clothing means paying workers more, which means setting higher prices for goods to keep the same profit margin, which means being outcompeted in the world commodities market by countries in which food is cheaper.

It’s also impossible to mechanize farming on a slave plantation, for the obvious reason that people forced into slavery will gladly sabotage your expensive machines. So, unlike capitalist firms, plantations are not in a race for automation to cut labor costs and outcompete each other - each plantation simply produces as much food as it has land available, which has the effect of preventing the rate of profit for farming as a whole from falling.

To explain: in each particular capitalist field of industry, each firm within it is trying to undercut the others by lowering its prices, which (if it wants to also make profit to spend on future expansion) it can only do by lowering its costs. And as all the firms are buying their input materials on the same market for the same price, the only way to lower costs is to spend less on paying workers - whether by reducing their wages, making them work more for the same wage, or, most significantly for the long term development of capitalism, by replacing them with machines.

Each firm is therefore in a race against the others to automate away as much of the workforce as they possibly can, with steam engines, spinning jennies and every other form of industrial machine - but as we know, profit can only come from the surplus value created by workers, meaning that, as the number of workers in an industry undergoing automation falls, so does the overall rate of profit for that industry.

However, in contrast, farming as a slave-based industry is able to maintain ‘ownership’ (in every sense) of a far larger fraction of the total number of workers in society - and therefore a much larger fraction of the total surplus value created by society - than farming under capitalism, meaning plantation owners as a class have much greater wealth, relative to industrialists, than they would as owners of farms under capitalism.

But of course, this situation harms the Northern industrialists, because high food prices mean they can’t compete on the world market. The logic of capitalism - the logic of the current level of development of the means of production - demands that farming be subject to mechanization. Slavery is outmoded, not because society has reached a higher level of moral and ethical development, but because it interferes with the seeking of maximum profit.

For as long as industries were competing with each other on the same continent, all suffering under the same prices for food, slavery as the primary basis for agriculture could carry on - but as soon as capitalist firms have eaten their local competition and started seeking out new markets on foreign shores, slave-agriculture becomes a fetter on accumulation that Capital must abolish. Under other circumstances, capitalist farms would simply appear and undercut the prices demanded by the plantation owners, but in the US the monopoly that the Southern slavers had over huge tracts of much higher quality farmland in a much better climate made this impossible. So, in the face of these totally incompatible material interests, the only possible outcome was the violent overthrow of the regressive class and the dissolution of their obsolete mode of production.

I wish more German soldiers were punished for shooting Polish people [finger of the monkey’s paw curls]

God, this 1998-spaceship-flight-sim ass poster design I would really appreciate the nostalgia for that kind of zero-budget “labor of love by scifi nerds” aesthetic if it weren’t attached to one of the most expensive media projects in all of human history

If it came to that, and some rounding up minorities got domed, this type of guy would be the first to cry out against the use of violence