[benreesman]

Arrogant? You guys think you’re immune from consequences. You think everyone smart and relentless enough to represent any challenge is either already bought or easily sidelined.

There are more of us than you think who walked straight out no education and no connections and trivially operated at comparable levels to privileged and credentialed peers.

But the values are different: when you combine a street kid’s skepticism of our magistrates and noblemen with the first hand experience of seeing how utterly bankrupt the whole artifice is you get implacable enemies with extreme tolerance for adversity who play for keeps in a way no one can who ever benefitted from the system.

Underestimate us all you like.

[JumpCrisscross]

> think you’re immune from consequences

I’m saying they can get away and get their resources out faster than before, and even before they were mostly fine.

> you get implacable enemies with extreme tolerance for adversity who play for keeps in a way no one can who ever benefitted from the system

These are never the beneficiaries in revolution. Ever. That doesn’t stop revolution. Folks say “fuck you” when enough is enough. But again, it’s not rebirth—it’s bowing out of the civilisation game. The “revolutions” we romanticise preserved preëxisting power structures.

To the extent America stands on the precipice of revolution, it’s in the molds of Cæsar and Augustus.

[benreesman]

> I’m saying they can get away and get their resources out faster than before, and even before they were mostly fine.

A Reaper drone with Hellfire missiles can go just about anywhere that bilateral money laundering legislation and agreements can’t. If Bill Gross or Larry Summers manages to get gold bullion into the DPRK? Yeah, maybe he’s beyond the long arm of the American public.

I’m reticent to even mention this peripherally because it’s a troll magnet but the example is too compelling to pass by. I’m not a native of the region and I don’t feel fit to moralize about it, but I am an avid student of asymmetrical multi-axis warfare with an emphasis on countermeasures to state-sponsored digital surveillance and militarized domestic police forces because the only way the peace will be kept is if the arch-Randian villains back down after a robust force assessment.

Whatever the morality of this or that actor in the region, the strategy and tactics of the IDF and Mossad are basically a masterclass in flipping the ostensible balance of power over with ease and a sneer: and while the details are many people’s life’s work, the terminal game theory node is that they’ll do anything. They will always dramatically overreact with punitive collateral damage and flawless execution and there’s no upper bound. No one bluffs the IDF into accepting a status quo they don’t like over any meaningful period of time.

I’m pretty skeptical that this is a good posture for a nation state armed to the teeth, but again, not my lived experience.

It’s precisely the right posture for oppressed majorities in modern great power settings where none of the elected or appointed or confirmed officials can give Gates a parking ticket if he crashed a Tesla into Gary Gensler and somehow shouted a transphobic slur.

The Black community in America didn’t claw back some semblance of dignity via some condescending hand out: they scrupulously operated within the law until it was clear that the law was exhausted if not adversarial as a recourse and then Malcolm X and the Audubon Ballroom made it very clear that Afghanistan is a cakewalk next to Atlanta if some bargain isn’t struck. From Emmett Teal to LA 92 that community is a shining example of patriotism in both a dramatic preference for abiding the law and not fucking around on soft treatments of tyrants or collaborators when the missile goes up.

Amazon pays OSHA fines because it’s cheaper than obeying the law, there have been fatalities and countless injuries and Genghis Khan seems restrained and enlightened in terms of how those people should be handled if you want a meaningful deterrent. I’d happily settle for prison and call it a compromise. It’s difficult to point to a billion dollar line item on an invoice or a balance sheet anywhere and not see at least one moral felon giving you the finger in fucking Atherton or Los Gatos.

The rich and powerful and sociopathic can do exactly what the public will tolerate before we kill them, and not a Planck length more. They will export assets and shop for tax structures as far as they can before they cease to be a factor.

It astounds, perplexes, depresses, confuses, and enrages me that anyone anywhere would make an argument to egg them on to ever greater heights of brinksmanship with the most dangerous thing in the world: a vast public better armed than credible militaries and facing eviction via a letter from some walking atrocity like whoever does that for The Carlyle Group.

[benreesman]

It’s legitimately unpredictable in outcome to start talking this way and it’s been with a very heavy heart that I’ve been slowly but steadily turning up the volume for a few years now and I wouldn’t do it on Reddit because there are some hotheads over there.

I say it here because many people in this community are a coffee break away from telling curly-haired Zuck with a chain to “lay low, let the bullshit blow over. shear a sheep don’t skin it.”

The GP is both articulate and exceptionally brazen in the standard operating procedure of Vichy pribclings with micro clout: to state as fact the inevitability of some outcome where Goldman Sachs defrauds even more customers by shorting the products they sell as fiduciaries even faster and somehow less than zero people go to jail now based on a theory of economics that can charitably be analogized to a giant clock on the inside of a sphere: exigent shock, Laffer Curve, supply side, rational agent, strong efficient. Wazy woozy fairy dust never landed not on the elemental chart. Goldman quants know this.

It’s a low key flex/threat that belongs to Weinstein or something, not our aristocracy of merit and nobility: this is happening and it’ll be a lot less painful if you just lay as still as possible.

The GP correctly states that it coming to blows will be bad for everyone, it’s wild speculation that the harm will skew a certain way, it’s not ridiculous but it’s also a sleight of hand: it’s an argument that the working public should back down before it goes to hell.

Irrelevant, spurious, adversarially stated with malice aforethought.

And also just deeply wrong at the level of a sign bit: the kleptocracy has a lot to lose and any robust pricing would see them more inclined to compromise than the recently evicted or in some places the shopkeeper who douses himself in gasoline and lights a fire that’s still burning.

This tired song is the lazy propaganda bedazzled with GSElevator wit and sneer and the implication of secret hidden knowledge. I spent a regrettable amount of time getting drunk at Catch in the Meat Packing district in 2017 and after three gin and tonics they’ll happily tell anyone who can get past the Face Kontrol how much contempt they regard the rest of us with. They think it’s fucking hilarious that we fold hand after hand.