Thread by @leashless

@doctorow @VladZamfir @mattereum @avalancheavax My take is that democracy died when the nuclear bomb was invented: everything after that is fundamentally the National Security Apparatus wearing the skin of democracy like the bugs from Men in Black.

There are only 15 nuke-countries. Everything else is basically a vassal state.

@doctorow @VladZamfir @mattereum @avalancheavax This is not to say that there are not better and worse illusions of democracy: I think there's a *very* good chance that the UK would have thrived under Corbyn, and the US under Bernie. But they had strong positions on matters that impacted the defense world, and did not succeed.

@doctorow @VladZamfir @mattereum @avalancheavax This may seem bleak, but I'm watching this from the perspective of an Indian. I'm not in India, my father's family mostly escaped through academia.

50C most summers in India now, in cities without running water. It comes in trucks, in plastic jugs.

See: aljazeera.com/opinions/2018/…

@doctorow @VladZamfir @mattereum @avalancheavax The BBC has a nice write up of how the poor Indians are surviving the 50C heat, without ever really asking why they are so poor: they are so poor because the Industrial Revolution was run on gold from India and cotton from Egypt. That's the bottom line.

bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-…

@doctorow @VladZamfir @mattereum @avalancheavax Capitalism *is* colonialism. Colonialism *is* imperialism.

Now the hot frontier is western consumer goods being manufactured by slave labour, mostly in China and Africa. Nobody seems to care except when it's politically convenient to beat China up.

And then climate colonialism.

@doctorow @VladZamfir @mattereum @avalancheavax I see the Western Democracies colluding to destroy the world.

Not on climate change - well, yes, on climate change. America, leader of the free world, is roadblocking all climate progress.

But the real issue is the invention and deployment of the nuclear weapons, then MAD.

@doctorow @VladZamfir @mattereum @avalancheavax Where I want us to go is a one person one vote global democracy. I don't see a better way of dealing with climate change, and nothing less is going to rein in the western powers and their astonishing use of slave labour right into the 21st century.

I don't see how else to fix it

@doctorow @VladZamfir @mattereum @avalancheavax So what I'm looking for is a global trade transparency regime. Something that makes it possible for the cleanest 5% of the global economy to rapidly grow and push the rest to become more ethical: bit like vegans scaled vegetarianism. Spreading transparency
medium.com/humanizing-the…

@doctorow @VladZamfir @mattereum @avalancheavax The shape of our databases defines the shape of our societies: vimeo.com/161183966

A single global database which anybody can write to, and nobody can delete from, seems like an ideal vehicle for global transparency in trade to me.

I don't think anything else has the levers

@doctorow @VladZamfir @mattereum @avalancheavax I don't think "blockchainism" really describes what is happening on the blockchain at all.

It describes the activities of a very large number of fraud-prone carpetbaggers who have leapt on the back of the thing and distorted its goals.

The goal has always been to fix the world.

@doctorow @VladZamfir @mattereum @avalancheavax @threadreaderapp unroll