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The Cold War is often characterized as a struggle between two great ideas: Communism and Capitalism. The accepted narrative is that Capitalism - with its love of freedom, apple pie and Mom - was inevitably going to triumph, and now we live in the best of all possible worlds.

Isn't that depressing? That THIS is the best we can muster?

The triumph of Capitalism has definitely been reaffirmed time and time again over the past thirty years or so. The Left has become a withered husk, horrified at the thought of being labelled 'Socialist'. The Right has become eager to become ever more extreme, so long as 'extreme' means slashing all barriers to the accumulation of wealth.

Societies are defined by what they stand for. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the credit was given to those hard-working industrial capitalists whose Free Market Spirit crushed the Reds and their authoritarian regime. In the aftermath of that, it became downright irresponsible to stop these paragons of virtue from doing whatever they wanted with their hard-won capital.

The main virtue in our world isn't freedom; it is profit.

In some parts of the world, profit is pursued under democracies. In other parts of the world, dictatorships. If you're on the international stage, though, you're really on the international marketplace. We've allowed them to convince us that, in the post-war world, politics is really economics. We've even allowed them to get away with the claim that this is somehow indicative of human nature; that greed is what motivates us all.

Do you believe that? Really?

Most people know that money isn't everything; that the accumulation of wealth isn't a good enough reason to live your life. Most people know that the value of a life has nothing at all to do with how much stuff that person managed to get hold of.

Profit is what drives us to feel helpless in the face of environmental catastrophes (it isn't 'realistic' to expect companies to become environmentally friendly; think of their profit margins!) and it is profit that sees us stand silent in the face of brutal dictatorships and religious extremism (seriously - Saudi Arabia has far more to do with the spread of islamic fundamentalism than any of the countries we've bombed since 9/11).

Our drive for profit is selling the human race down the river.

Shouldn't we pick a better reason to live?

The Guardian has been getting some really good guest writers in recently.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/06/yanis-varoufakis-angela-merkel-crisis-global-minotaur-capitalism-europe

Picture the scene when a sheepish finance minister enters the chancellor's Berlin office bearing a control panel featuring one yellow and one red button, and telling her that she must choose to press one or the other. This is how he explains what each button will do:

The red button
If you press it, chancellor, the euro crisis ends immediately, with a general rise in growth throughout Europe, a sudden collapse of debt for each member state to below its Maastricht limit, no pain for Greek citizens (or for the Italians, Portuguese, etc), no guarantees for the periphery's debts (states or banks) to be provided by German and Dutch taxpayers, interest rate spreads below 3% throughout the eurozone, a diminution in the eurozone's internal imbalances, and a wholesale rise in aggregate investment.

The yellow button
If you press it, chancellor, the situation in the eurozone remains more or less as it is for a decade. The euro crisis continues to bubble along, albeit in a controlled fashion. While the probability of a break-up, which will be a calamity for Germany, remains non-trivial, the chances are that, if you push the yellow button, the eurozone will not break up (with a little help from the European Central Bank), German interest rates will remain extremely low, the euro will be nicely depressed ('nicely' from the perspective of German exporters), the periphery's spreads will be sky-high (but not explosive), Italy and Spain will enter deeper into a debt-deflationary spiral that sees to a reduction of their national income by 15% over the next three years, France shall slip steadily into quasi-insolvency, GDP per capita will rise slowly in the surplus countries and fall precipitously in the periphery. As for the first "fallen" nations (Greece, Ireland and Portugal), they shall become little Latvias, or indeed Kosovos: devastated lands (after the loss of between 25% and 40% of national income, a massive exodus of their skilled labour) on which our people will holiday and buy cheap real estate. In aggregate, if you choose the yellow button, chancellor, eurozone unemployment will remain well above UK and US levels, investment will be anaemic, growth negative and poverty on the up and up.

Which button do you think, dear reader, the chancellor would want to push?

I think the whole thing would have been better if he'd stuck with 'Wall Street' instead of 'The Global Minotaur' but hey... the whole thing is still worth a good read.

The way I see it, there's only three options on the table.

1) Laugh right along until the inevitable bang.
2) Try to get yourself free and take control of the car.
3) Get them to look in the mirror and hope they notice what they LOOK LIKE.

Option one doesn't seem like much of a solution, and those knots look pretty tight... so start gesticulating wildly, I guess. It probably won't help, but you never know when there might be a moment of clarity.

This bears thinking about.

Thing is, things need fixing as much as other things need stopping.

So, I need to escape the crazy brothers, and find someone sane and capable to drive.

Aye, that's the difficult bit.

Every time I think I see a good driver, it turns out they don't let those people in their car, they think they have to keep an eye on the drivers more than the road in front of them... or they've filled the ashtrays with teeth. They're just usually better at hiding their horribleness than the Brothers Koch.

The way I see it, there's only three options on the table.

1) Laugh right along until the inevitable bang.
2) Try to get yourself free and take control of the car.
3) Get them to look in the mirror and hope they notice what they LOOK LIKE.

Option one doesn't seem like much of a solution, and those knots look pretty tight... so start gesticulating wildly, I guess. It probably won't help, but you never know when there might be a moment of clarity.

I enjoyed it for two-three weeks, barely managed to scratch the surface, and haven't been back to finish it off yet.

I feel such shame 

The greeks have voted no to austerity!

The coolest Finance Minister in the world has resigned!

Polls are proven - again - to be worth less than nothing!

It'll be interesting to see what happens from here on out. The chiding from the press and politicians has already been pretty great. I might hunt out some favourite quotes later on, but it looks like a Greek exit from the Euro - and possibly Europe as an institution - is very likely in the near future.

I saw someone saying that a eurozone exit has to come with a european exit because if they are part of europe and under the european courts, people can bring law suits against them for loss of business by leaving the currency. So the only reasonable thing to do is exit so those courts have no relevance. I could be completely misinterpreting third hand information though.

That sounds like a misinterpretation of the upcoming TTIP to me. It will soon be possible for some corporations to sue governments for loss of business resulting from broken/changed contracts made with previous governments (which they cannot currently do). Even if it did apply in this case, though, the TTIP isn't law yet and the exit will happen before it is.

The greeks have voted no to austerity!

The coolest Finance Minister in the world has resigned!

Polls are proven - again - to be worth less than nothing!

It'll be interesting to see what happens from here on out. The chiding from the press and politicians has already been pretty great. I might hunt out some favourite quotes later on, but it looks like a Greek exit from the Euro - and possibly Europe as an institution - is very likely in the near future.

I really enjoyed this. Stewart Lee's rants often remind me of stuff I'd read here.

In Norfolk on Thursday, the tarmac melted, and ducklings became trapped in sticky blackness. When a lioness whelped in an ancient Roman street, Caesar thought something was up. Here, solid matter transmuted to hot liquid and swallowed baby birds whole. How surreal do the signs and warnings have to become before we stop in our tracks? Are whales required to fall from the sky? Does Tim Henman have to give birth to a two-headed cat on Centre Court?

In all likelihood, if the Greeks default, things will be very bad for them in the short term and they won't be able to borrow money - so things would get worse for a while (1-5 years).

HOWEVER, there's an important caveat here. Dropping out of the Euro (which would be a necessity) will allow them to devalue their currency and make Greece a very attractive proposition for tourists - which is already one of their major sources of income. It would also make Greece tempting for foreign investors - albeit the sort you get in risky, unstable situations - so shady sorts with bad work practices, but probably more than they are getting at the moment.

Defaulting won't erase the debt, either. Eventually, Greece will be forced to pay it back - the kind of people who lend in billions have a very long memory. But, they won't have to pay it back until they are in a position to do so - they can take all the money they are currently putting into paying off debt and use that to drive an economic recovery. In ten, twenty, fifty years time, when that recovery has taken place - that's the point where Greece can make the decision to start paying off its debts.

It would, in the short term, see the situation get very bad, but in the middle-longer term, it is the only sensible option IMO. The current situation sees Greece crippling itself in order to get more money borrowed to keep paying back the people they are borrowing money from. This will go on indefinitely - its already been going on for close to a decade - if Greece does not take a radical step to break the cycle.

The creditors also need to realize that if they act unreasonably - as they have done - they will hurt themselves as much as they hurt their debtors. If the people who leant the money today see that the Greek's grandchildren will be paying it back to THEIR grandchildren, and not to them, they might be inclined to act more reasonably in future - though probably not.

ETA: It is also worth keeping in mind that a large part of the problem here is that Greece does not have a sovereign currency. If they still had the drachma and had borrowed in drachma, they would be able to devalue their currency and cut down the debt that way - which is what the UK did following Black Wednesday when we exited the ERM and were fortunate to have valued our debt in GBP. Unfortunately, that isn't an option to Greece because the value of the Euro is not something they can control, and all their debt is valued in Euros.

The people who profit from Greece being forced to pay back the loans are the people who leant Greece the money. The latest figures I could find break it down like this:

€2.4 bn - Foreign Banks
€4.3 bn - Bank of Greece
€10.5 bn - Assorted Creditors (hedge funds etc)
€11 bn - Assorted Greek Banks
€20 bn - European Central Bank
€25 bn - Spain
€32 bn - IMF
€34 bn - Assorted Eurozone Nations
€37 bn - Italy
€42 bn - France
€48.8 bn - Miscellaneous Investors
€56 bn - Germany

€323 bn total (In 2012 the debt was €360 bn so... hooray, progress!)

Note: Many of these countries/investors benefit doubly because the money Greece borrowed from them was then spent on goods and services from them - like the military spending Cain pointed out.

This heat.

I haven't slept for more than 2-3 hours uninterrupted all week. I'm starting to feel like a frog in boiling water, only the sadist is fucking incompetent so they've had to jam a lid on the top which I keep slamming my skull into.

This is how supervillains are made.

Keep it up, sun, and I will find a way to END YOU 

Could be worse.

My flat makes it so that it's 10-20 degrees hotter inside than outside, day or night.  It's clearly some kind of building error (possibly the boiler) but whatever it is, it means I've slept 10 hours over the past 4 nights.  I'm sweating just sitting down and typing this, and I have a fan on full power behind me.

That is... awful. How have you not boiled? 

This heat.

I haven't slept for more than 2-3 hours uninterrupted all week. I'm starting to feel like a frog in boiling water, only the sadist is fucking incompetent so they've had to jam a lid on the top which I keep slamming my skull into.

This is how supervillains are made.

Keep it up, sun, and I will find a way to END YOU 

But Cain, Greek farmers bought nice cars! Morally, we don't have any choice but to burn the whole country to the ground, salt the fields, sacrifice the firstborn of every family and leave the smouldering remains as a testament to those who would dare offend The Market.

The fuck does joining the army have to do with perpetuating war?

Its okay guys, there's an indiegogo campaign now so it'll all be sorted by next week.