The masses will always be attracted to the opiates offered them by those seeking to control them for greedy purposes.

No, they count as a colony as far as I’m concerned. But there’s a difference in how they are treated. PR is basically treated as an independent nation, despite having voted for statehood (ignored by the ruling GOP). HK wanted to have just a modicum of independence, and the Chinese government reacted with goons and gulags.

The ol’ Ellen Pao

There was a time when the US was as colonialist as China, but in the 20th century it let the Philippines go, and passed on turning Germany and Japan into colonies, and let the Panama Canal go back to Panama. There’s an analogy to Hong Kong in there somewhere, or with North Korea which remains a totalitarian puppet of China to this day.

The US is far from perfect, but they’re not China. Not even close.

Yeah but why would we be more concerned about Chinese competition than say, the EU? Because China showed who they are in Hong Kong, and we want that to be as un-powerful as possible.

At least not until they use their influence operations to elect a pro-China president.

This article goes into some details that I’ll just recklessly post a big section of here:

Then, after he won the election, Biden committed to the cause like no other president had in modern times. He appointed one of the movement’s brightest and most aggressive reformers, Lina Khan, to run the FTC, as well as other fierce critics of corporate concentration in key posts, including Jonathan Kanter, who took over the antitrust division of the DOJ, and Tim Wu, who became a key economic adviser inside the White House. Six months after taking office, Biden issued a whole-of-government executive order that called on 17 different government agencies to take 72 actions to foster competition and protect consumers against monopolies. As a result, agencies like the FTC, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Food and Drug Administration have cracked down on public scourges like price gouging, noncompete contracts, and banking-related junk fees, and created new rules to make consolidated industries like the hearing aid market more competitive.

Under Kanter and Khan, the DOJ and FTC have also filed far more ambitious antitrust investigations than any administration in decades. Last summer, an investigation into several food production conglomerates over wage suppression and collusion resulted in an $85 million settlement, one of several successful DOJ investigations into no-poach and wage-fixing schemes across the economy. In December, the FTC successfully blocked the medical data firm IQVIA’s attempt to monopolize the business of advertising to doctors through the purchase of an ad tech company called DeepIntent. And in January, a judge sided with the DOJ in its suit against a JetBlue-Spirit merger, the first successful prosecution of an airline merger in 40 years.

The effect of a more aggressive posture from regulators goes beyond favorable court rulings: Under the threat of litigation, Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Berkshire Hathaway, and the chipmaker Nvidia were some of the companies to back off multibillion-dollar acquisitions of smaller firms. Biden’s regulators filed a record 50 antitrust enforcement actions last year, and mergers dropped to a 10-year low.

These actions don’t get media attention because the media treats the government like some reality TV bullshit

Justifiable anger can be stupid and usually is.

UnitedHealth, employer of slain exec Brian Thompson

Not quite correct sort of. This is OptumRx, which is owned by United Health Group, which also owns United Health Care, which Brian Thompson was nominally the CEO of. In other words, this is like the sibling of the company Brian Thompson ran.

To be clear, Brian Thmpson wasn’t a billionaire, he was a mid-level at best millionaire worth only $41 million. He was just another star-bellied prole who thought he was in the aristocracy.

Point being, the whole thing is stupid. The health care system, the people getting rich off it, Luigi’s reaction to it, our reactions to it, the media’s reporting on it, all of it.