Under capitalism, the capitalist class controls the media, and can use their wealth to control the political class.
A democracy can only make choices so far as it’s voters are informed, and when a group controls most sources of information, it can control the democracy as a whole.
It’s not weird that it specifies a computer program, the use of the term to mean the standard option comes from computing. It’s the value chosen when the computer defaults, as in fails to pay it’s debt (in this case debt being the value it was looking for).
I don’t think there’s any evidence to suggest that people prefer meat because it’s the default option and not the other way around.
You could, but the only reason to do so would be to accommodate a small minority’s ethical dietary decisions, which is the opposite of a default.
No one’s going to chose the slop so there’s no point in having it.
As for subway, their menu is largely determined by sales. They do trial other options occasionally, and the ones that are popular stay.
Humans don’t need anything but nutrient slop to survive, but the prisons aim for something better largely because it keeps riots down.
Why would the default be the diet of a small minority?
Well, you’ve got to get rid of it some way, and while charity might systematically be a problem there are plenty that do genuine good.
If you have any decency, get rid of most of it, preferably to charities or political causes.
That sort of wealth in the hands of a single person is obscene, and spending it on luxury when there are people starving and homeless in the world is the height of immorality.
Foolish if the goal is to hold on to more money than you could ever need in ten lifetimes to pursue the goal of accumulating more from the work of others.
No, it’s more like doctor or engineer where it’s a protected profession that’s criminal to imitate.
We can, through collective effort, precipitate change away from or reverse negative change, and the first step to that is complaining about it.
The measured pool is chess players, not random people they picked off the street.
Add to that, the Russia air-defense systems have proven very effective.
Proven effective against cold-war era planes maybe. There have been a few improvements in the past 50 years. Those same Russian air-defence systems proved themselves effectively useless against the F-117 in the Balkans, and the F-35 is miles above the F-117.
Vietnam and Korea proved that 1950s and 1970s era technology was not up to the task, not that it was not possible. The main issue with both was the lack of accuracy.
The US can’t sustain minor campaigns of shelling random cities in the Global South without running out of munitions.
“Running out” in this case meaning dipping below normal stockpile levels.
Yes, but mainly that’s because NATOs ammo production was very limited. The factories are all designed to be scaled up massively in times of need, but pre-2022, NATO was barely producing enough to maintain stockpiles.
NATO doctrine relies heavily on airpower for any large military conflict. The NATO ground armies might be relatively small, but their combined air forces are qualitatively superior in every metric and at minimum three times larger than any potential opponent. 10k people can hold off 500k when they have a giant arsenal of precision guided weapons and complete control of the air.
What we are seeing with ludicrously over valued companies like Tesla and cryptocurrencies is what Marx described as fictitious capital.
The US is not going to collapse from investor shock, its produces a huge surplus of food and oil, and the use of its military to enforce the dollar as the world’s reserve currency protects it from market crises since the whole world subsidises the federal reserve simply printing more money.
No amount of money is going to change attitudes that severely without some sort of forced indoctrination. It didn’t work with Hamas, their attitude was there from the start, and years of Israeli and Iranian funding has only helped them remain one of the major Palestinian political organisations.
And please, Israel is an apartheid state sure, no arguments here, but the Palestinian population is one of the fasted growing in the world. They are entirely at the mercy of the Israeli state, and if the Israeli goal were to exterminate them as you say, they would have had some results in the past seventy years.
How exactly could Israel try to be a pluralistic society? Neither side will accept a one state solution.
History has proven time and again that given the opportunity, the nation’s bordering Israel in every direction (save possibly Lebanon) will try to either annex Israel or restore the entirety of it to an Arab nationalist muslim government.
Should such an event come to pass, the displacement of the entire population would be a best case scenario. The Jewish population of Syria and Jordan are both zero, and Egypt’s is less than 20, down from several hundred thousand between the three in 1948.
There is no way to interpret the Hama’s charter other than incitement to genocide.
The major factors preventing another Arab-Israeli war are tensions with Iran, Billions of dollars in US military aid, and the nuclear weapons likely owned by the Israeli state.
Dissolve the Israeli state, and unless you replace with something similar, and those factors will no longer stand. Compromise the territorial integry of the new state to any serious degree, including ceding the west bank to a Palestinian state, and Israel becomes militarily indefensible.
Sure, it shouldn’t have been created, but it’s here now, and the majority of people living in it were born there. We can’t make it go away by wishful thinking.
It’s neither of those things. Words have meanings, and legal terms have very specific meanings.