Mostly illiterate is practically true already for the U.S. with most adults reading skills worse than those of sixth graders.

It helps to distinguish between personal belief and institutionalized religion.

Okay, I’ll be the silent part

Juggling. I’d find some nice stones or pinecones and teach everyone how to juggle and do some tricks. I also know an ancient game you can play with stones or knuckle bones. And I know some songs. And stories. People in the stone age had lots of free time to pass, so all of these would come in handy.

Yes, I guess the economic reasons for patriarchy would still be there. Splitting productive wage labor from unpaid labor that reproduces the ability to work would still be helpful to capital.

Okay, I’m convinced. Let’s go ahead and turn everyone gay.

I think, Venice is still the only city literally charging an entrance fee. They do that, because they got more tourists, than the city could handle. But I think what you have heard might be about tourist taxes. Many cities charge those per night. But you won’t notice it directly, it’s just that, if you’re staying in a hotel, they’ll automatically add it to the price of the room.

I second Prague. It’s beautiful and worth it whether you come for the history or the culture or the atmosphere.

Even if everyone was suddenly turned gay, having grown up in a patriarchal society might still leave many cis men unable to express their emotions, form meaningful connections and do anything effective about their loneliness.

Crows are so shy, it’s too cute! They’re like cats, if you stare at them or lock eyes, they get really nervous. So slowly close your eyes and look away to put then at ease. If you pull out food they like, like peanuts in their shell, you can almost see a little exclamation mark appearing above their heads, like 🥜 ❗ 🐦‍⬛

Since we’re talking about doomerism: I think It’s fine to try to analyze risks in order to take appropriate steps, but pure Doomerism (not saying this was meant that way) is reactionary. Because it clings to a a liberal notion of safety that never existed, but is supposedly getting lost. And then it immediately transitions to defeatism. The truth is, as leftists, we’ll never be safe until capitalism ends. Wether it’s systemic indirect violence, a cops gun or a nuclear bomb that kills us, we’ll be just as dead. Our task to organize against all those things remains the same. Like the well known quote by Huey P Newton sais:

The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.

Not everyone can be that fearless and not everyone has to be. It’s okay to be afraid and share that feeling and rely on others for strength. Doomerism only becomes a problem, if it discounts the worth of the struggles being fought out there (again, not saying anyone did, just talking in general).

I agree, that topic is too often ignored. But the point of the book is not transitions from one economic system to the other, but transitions of centers of capitalist power from one region to another. Including centers of trade and centers of finance, that existed before capitalism really became the dominant economic system worldwide. Though capitalist production of commodities already existed in places. And then the book focuses on the hegemonies. France lost the seven year war and that was part of the reason why the revolution happened there. And even if it rivaled Britain for some time, the French empire never became hegemonic at the same global scale.

I don’t know about peaceful, but Giovanni Arrighi explains in The Long Twentieth Century , how and why during the history of capitalism, power passed from one Italian city state to another, then to the Dutch empire, to the British empire, to the American empire and is now in the process of passing to China.

There is a newer edition from 2010 and in it, Arrighi writes about China:

accommodating the upward mobility of a state that by itself accounts for about one-fifth of the world population is an altogether different matter. It implies a fundamental subversion of the very pyramidal structure of the hierarchy. Indeed, to the extent that recent research on world income inequality has detected a statistical trend towards declining inter-country inequality since 1980, this is due entirely to the rapid economic growth of China

we pointed out two major obstacles to a non-catastrophic transition to a more equitable world order. The first obstacle was US resistance to adjustment and accommodation. Paraphrasing David Calleo, (1987: 142) we noted that the Dutchand the British-centered world systems had broken down under the impact of two tendencies: the emergence of aggressive new powers, and the attempt of the declining hegemonic power to avoid adjustment and accommodation by cementing its slipping preeminence into an exploitative domination. Writing in 1999, we maintained: there are no credible aggressive new powers that can provoke the breakdown of the US-centered world system, but the United States has even greater capabilities than Britain did a century ago to convert its declining hegemony into an exploitative domination. If the system eventually breaks down, it will be primarily because of US resistance to adjustment and accommodation. And conversely, US adjustment and accommodation to the rising economic power of the East Asian region is an essential condition for a non-catastrophic transition to a new world order (Arrighi and Silver 1999: 288-9).

About the US response to the burst of the new economy bubble and the war on terror, Arrighi writes:

Indeed, to a far greater extent than in previous hegemonic transitions, the terminal crisis of US hegemony — if that is what we are observing, as I think we are — has been a case of great power “suicide”

Less immediate but equally important, however, is a second obstacle: the still unverified capacity of the agencies of the East Asian economic expansion to “open up a new path of development for themselves and for the world that departs radically from the one that is now at a dead-end.” This would require a fundamental departure from the socially and ecologically unsustainable path of Western development in which the costs for the reproduction of humans and nature have been largely “externalized” (see figure P1), in important measure by excluding the majority of the world’s population from the benefits of economic development. This is an imposing task whose trajectory will in large part be shaped by pressure from movements of protest and self-protection from below.

The growing economic weight of China in the global political economy does not in itself guarantee the emergence of an East Asia-centered world market society based on the mutual respect of the world’s cultures and civilizations. As noted above, such an outcome presupposes a radically different model of development that, among other things, is socially and ecologically sustainable and that provides the global South with a more equitable alternative to continuing Western domination. All previous hegemonic transitions were characterized by long periods of systemic chaos, and this remains a possible alternative outcome. Which of the alternative future scenarios set out in thee Long Twentieth Century materialize remains an open question whose answer will be determined by our collective human agency.

Seems like China, with belt and road, is on a good path for dealing with this second obstacle, so the task for leftists in the imperial core is to deal with the first one: contain the violent lashing out of the dying empire and focus our organizing efforts against war.

It was very clear, that the British Empire’s days were numbered almost 200 years earlier. And it took two mayor wars for them to get the point. 1775-1783 and 1812-1815. The "great rapprochement" wasn’t until 1895-1915. The US empire needs to catch on that it’s over way faster than that, preferably without starting World War III.

Yes, it would sound absolutely natural and fair, if a survivor talking about a concentration camp were to say:“The Germans did this to us”. And it would sound totally ridiculous to correct them like:“That’s racist! Not all Germans! You mean the Nazis did this!”. And yet, I’m absolutely certain some people would say exactly this.

Oh yes, that would be great!

What if country A doesn’t produce that much at all and instead just prints dollars, then uses it’s military to force everyone to trade oil and everything else in dollars enjoying a steady flow of goods and services in exchange for cheap paper? And what if country A then suddenly reverses course (because other countries start to move away from the dollar anyway) and tries to cash in on this flow, while it’s still going, with high tariffs?

That’s the official reasoning even. They say it’s to make the “defense” industry more independent. And whether planned or not, it increases the likelihood of global war:

A similar thing happened in the lead up to the great depression and World War II: faced with a recession, the ruling class turned to protectionism with the Tariff Act of 1930. With the very high tarrifs, the recession worsened into the Great Depression until World War II saved the economy by enabling mass employment.

War is great for the capitalist class, if they want to win some time against an economic crisis, because it’s a way to have mass government spending without cutting into anyones profits. If value gets created by a not for-profit entity in any sector, profits go down, because businesses who need to make a profit can’t compete. Capitalists love war, because it only destroys value instead.

It’s the golden triple chance for profit: first accumulation by dispossession (taxes and austerity to finance the war effort flowing directly to weapons manufacturers), then imperialism (opening new markets, stealing resources), then restarting the production cycle (lucrative contracts for rebuilding efforts after everything is destroyed).

Leftists reaction to the tarrifs must be to shift organizing to focus more strongly on anti war efforts.

Yes, great time to build up domestic demand and raise living standards in China.

Let’s hope these new “export licenses” really do get used against the US in practice. So far, it’s just the legal groundwork to restrict the supply. Nothing’s been turned off yet.

All these fears are completely unfounded and ridiculous, but you know what? If I had a button to press for trans liberation, but it actually somehow meant destroying every organized sports competition on the planet forever, I wouldn’t hesitate for one microsecond to press it.