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arctotherium Profile picture
@arctotherium42
Apr 5, 2025 • 5 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
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Thank you Google and Sundar Pichai for enshittifying and degrading your products after making them indispensable parts of the infrastructure and history of the Internet. Very nice. Image
Some previous comments on Google. Search is the most egregious example of this.
Google was the biggest Harris donor.
Google's also been busted for using Gmail to differentially suppress Republican fundraising emails, which has probably swung a number of close local/state elections.
The backdrop to all this is white men getting purged from the company and replaced with Asians.

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More from @arctotherium42

arctotherium Profile picture
Jun 15
More excerpts on Colonial Mexico from TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood" (1973). Fehrenbach saw the discovery of silver in Mexico, mostly in the arid north, as a disaster, as it led to Spain administering Mexico as a loot box rather than developing the productive economy. Image
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The thinly-populated, but silver-rich North became a military frontier. Image
The suspicious Spanish Crown gave those born in Spain, the peninsulares, a monopoly on offices (and commerce) in New Spain. As offices were the main route to upwards mobility, the local creoles resented this. Image
Read 22 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
Jun 15
Thread with excerpts from the colonial Mexico portion of "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1973). Image
The Catholic Monarchs who united Spain reined in the aristocracy, abolished serfdom, disempowered the Castilian parliaments, and ended all noble presumptions to royal powers and revenues, creating a new bureaucracy (with a new army) to run the state loyal to themselves. Image
Spain combined this modern bureaucratic state and army with maintenance of privileges for the old nobility and an almost medieval religious mindset. Image
Image
Read 25 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
Jun 14
Thread with excerpts from the Spanish Conquest section of T. R. Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1973). Image
According to the Mexic accounts, the years leading up to the arrival of Cortes were full of terrible omens. To avert the prophesized disaster, Montezuma (disastrously) greatly increased tribute from subject cities and even replaced the govt of his (now former) ally Texcoco. Image
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Repartimiento and encomienda, systems by which Indians were 'entrusted' to a Spaniard and owed him labor for protection, were not at all unusual; most Eurasian farmers bore similar burdens and both were long-standing Iberian institutions. Image
Read 38 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
Jun 10
Thread with excerpts from the pre-Columbian chapters of T. R. Fehrenbach's Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico (1973/1995). This is a very dense and detailed book; this thread is not even close to comprehensive. Image
Meso-American civilization was one civilization; there were no separate Aztec/Mexic/Yucatec/Maya/etc civilizations. The peoples discovered by Cortes were inheritors rather than creators. Image
For its entire history, Meso-American culture was extraordinarily urban, more like the Orient than that of the European dark ages. But these were not so much commercial or mercantile cities as religious and defensive ones. Image
Read 36 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
Jun 2
Thread with excerpts from Richard Pipes' Property and Freedom (1999). Pipes is a historian of Russia, and the thesis of the book is that private property, as something distinct and protected from public power and sovereignty, is indispensable to human freedom. Image
One of the fundamental differences between Russia and the rest of Europe lay in the weak development of private property; one of the major themes of Western philosophical history is the benefits and drawbacks of private property; Russian philosophers unanimously condemn it. Image
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Freedom, as used by Pipes, includes political freedom, legal freedom, economic freedom, and personal rights. It does not include the right to public support ("freedom from want"); such 'rights' are at best a moral claim and at worst an unearned privilege. Image
Read 67 tweets
arctotherium Profile picture
Jun 1
Red state pension funds tend to vote with management if management is providing good returns (ie, doing their job); blue state pension funds tend to vote with management if the company does leftist things (ie, ESG, or not paying CEOs very much). Image
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This reflects a general difference in attitude towards institutions; rightists prefer institutions do what they were created for (eg police should fight crime, the military should fight wars, companies should make money doing their business, schools should teach)...
...while left-wingers want every institution to have pushing the Party Line as its #1 priority (extremely totalitarian in that regard). The formers produces a better society, the latter is more politically powerful but destroys everything in the long run.
Read 5 tweets

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