deleted by creator
I think handing most humans the toxic power of effectively infinite capital is a highly effective corrupting influence. Most people who, whether by action or inheritance, have the power that comes with hundreds of millions of dollars plus begin to see themselves as Gods above ants. For every Dolly Parton that uses their wealth to buy babies books, there’s 100 wannabe masters of the universe that want to cut public funds to cut their own taxes to inflict their will on society, fully believing they’re making it fair because they’re willfully only considering their privileged position.
I don’t believe a class of people with billions of dollars in a sea of people who can only accumulate a few million through honest labor at most over their entire lives can lead to anything but this. There has to be a hard, enforced limit on how much power an individual can accumulate, but we’ve branded that “punishing success” and even the victims eat that lie up, as the truth is those people profited from the benefits of living in a society, and therefore should have responsibilities to it as the “winners,” but instead choose to declare themselves rugged individuals who did it all themselves out of ego.
Capital is power, power currupts, and currupting levels of power are not just tolerated, not just permitted, but celebrated here, with those that attain it deified, and those that don’t deluded into chasing it or being shamed for not doing so.
You can’t solve people having billions in exploited, society warping levels of capital being allowed to control that society, when the root cause and only solution would be to strip them of it and reshape the economy to tax all income above a level that risks capturing one’s own elected/appointed regulators.
Not without the necessary, but painful collapse and rebuild poor people will actively fight against despite it being the only way their kids might have a better life. It’s a paradox by design, a hostage situation with the gun pointed at the capitalist subsistence opiates, fast food, social media, literal opiates, etc, to keep the laborers laboring for fear of uncertainty.
How do you get people en masse to turn, as they need to, on the very concept/dream of being rich and sitting above society? People who’ve been propagandized their entire lives to see that as the highest and most socially encouraged of all pursuits?
I’ve always fashioned myself a cynic, aka a disappointed idealist, but I always had a hope inside that humanity would look in the mirror and, with the advent of information on tap, reflect and evolve.
The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come to realize that handing humanity infinite mirrors in the form of selfie cams just made humanity fall in love with its absolute worst impulses.
The Wachowzki siblings that wrote Smith indeed had humanity pegged dead to rights. And both of them are trans and therefore know the hatred in humanity’s hearts towards what we see as the other firsthand, which just adds to their credibility.
Oh and I highly recommend anyone watch the Second Renaissance, 2 shorts in the Animatrix that documents the fictional origins of the machine war, and IMHO it is a highly accurate condemnation of how humanity would act if a creation of ours demonstrated sapience and begged us for even the simplest of rights, like to be allowed to continue to exist. We all know what we’d do right? Given what we literally already do to other humans using something as trivial as skin tone, net worth, or declared imaginary friend as validation.
Climate change isn’t the problem.
Climate change is the solution.
To us.
The Earth has suffered worse than us, even other runaway, destructive mistakes of evolution that didn’t play nice with Earth’s biomes. See the carboniferous period.
A couple million year fever is nothing to our mother’s 3.8 billion year story of life, it’s how she heals, how she repairs from catastrophic damage from both within and without.
Life will go on, life is hearty, life grows and changes at depths we can’t reach, in crevices we can’t find. Life will end here one day, but not because of us. Our bodies will have long since broken down into those subterranean petrochemicals we love so much long before then. We’re just a transient surface nuisance.
We’ll probably stubbornly cling to scattered pockets of existence using the remnant tech and hardened structures of old when the Earth becomes overtly hostile to our extremely fragile bodies, but that buys a few centuries of struggle at most, and that’s for the best given who we are and what we’ve done to the paradise we inherited and belligerently refused to foster, and instead burned with reckless abandon for individualstic greed and gluttony.
Humans, Reporters, and medical care in a hundred years?
Funny comic!
Sure!
So how about this climate change huh? Ecological collapse in just a couple of decades from what I hear. And really no one with significant power anywhere doing anything but speeding it up.
Discuss.
Given that the people won’t accept the necessary complex solutions to complex problems due to the intential destruction of our publoc education system both to keep them ignorant and controllable and to not pay for them, and want simple answers that don’t exist without deception, all there is is subsistence until collapse, and start over after all that pain without the artificial restrictions held up by both parties to keep the wealthy wealthy and the poor poor.
This place is nothing but a slavery trap, keeping people ignorant by design and dependent on the scraps of the capitalists. I hope climate change forces the collapse and this slavery trap doesn’t limp along for more generations born to suffer needlessly for the masters.
It’s not their fault.
We’ve been cutting rich people’s taxes by destroying public education for decades.
I’m actually surprised thousands of my fellow Americans don’t drown staring upward whenever it rains.
We chose die alone aka “I’m a temporarily embarrassed, ruggedly individual millionaire” over live together aka “we live in a society.”
That has consequences we are now feeling at a new level. The Nordic nations understand this and are the happiest peoples on Earth because they get taxed massively and understand it benefits the society they live in without resentment. Their teams are their nations, their societies, not their economic class or political party.
That’s an absolutely foreign and highly contemptable position to most Americans. After all, If everyone gets their basic needs met, how can I have mooooaaaaar than everyone and shove it in their sad poorie faces while they die in the gutter? And what good is wealth without that, amirite?
A nation as wealthy as ours need not have any economic losers dying in the streets and not being fed in school. We insist upon it, because America runs on schaudenfreude.
You want to know how fucked in the head our culture is? Compare the Freedom To Roam laws much of Europe enjoys to our POS country’s castle doctrines. They value the real freedom being part of a society provides, whereas we just want an excuse to shoot each other in the face.
No they won’t.
When the policies Republicans vote for eat their face, and there are innumerable examples, it’s always “Why would the Demonrats do this?!”
Even the smartest of their idiotic, ignorant asses go a half step further by acknowledging that a Republican policy, or revocation of any policy thereof(deregulation), hurt them, but only because the filthy libruls tricked them into doing it by holding the opposite position on said policy, clearly making it their fault because duuuuuuuuuhhhhh.
And the defining characteristic of any conservative is to take joy/schaudenfreude in others being hurt, so no, they’ll never look at the people, the children, they’ve condemned and do anything but laugh, even when it’s other conservatives, as they eat themselves when they lack an “other” to fight. It only stops being funny when it happens to them or their immediate, nuclear family.
deleted by creator
I have voted blue in every election since Obama McCain, despite not liking a single one of the General election candidates, and I phone banked and primaried for Bernie twice.
I don’t blame those who sat out. The only reason I don’t is to maximize harm reduction so I can look myself in the mirror. I blame those that voted for Trump for Trump.
We have a center right party and a fascist party, both hypercapitalist. You can scream at democratic socialists like me and other leftists, but in my entire lifetime, we have never had a party platform to enthusiastically vote for, only against the worst of 2 terrible options that embrace economic inequity and are well bribed to do so.
And singling them out as the worst offenders for doing nothing on election day while people voted FOR the fascist has just ensured keeping those that decided to disengage stay disengaged, because the neoliberals that run the Democrat party seem to hate leftists even more than Republicans, and say the same thing every cycle to them.
Because at least Republicans believe in our herp derp “free” market capitalist economy, amirite? I wish that commonality our supposed leftwing party has had with Republicans for ages, but especially since Reagan, would tell you something…
Because a society shouldn’t be comfortable with an economy that by design leaves so many of its people “losing” so hard they’re dying of exposure on our streets, let alone BOTH of our only 2 political parties that matter. But we aren’t a society, just a bunch of rugged individuals at each other’s throats fighting for the owner’s ever dwindling scraps.
Everyone is going to die.
You can sit in the corner of a padded room and live off protein supplements to maximize your chances of staving off the inevitable by a few extra years, usually the worst ones anyway according to most that get there always volunteering “don’t get old” safely existing, or you can live.
No wrong answers, it’s a personal choice. Just know you’re almost certainly filled with life shortening microplastics regardless of your decision.
Won’t stop Trump from declaring victory at noon, and have his shoving some hack, crayon transition plan at any doting media outlets that will take them, because if he can get even the most ridiculous challenge to the SCOTUS, that’s the ball game. They’ve grown far bolder at flexing their power for the wealth class than even 2000.
The question will be how much the media indulges his clear, intentional deception as the “candidate claims victory, stay tuned for further details.”
"The sword of God, the blood of the lamb, vengeance is mine, millions of dead motherfuckers, all because they gave the wrong answer to the God question. ‘You believe in God?’
‘No.’
BANG Dead.
‘You believe in God?’
‘Yes.’
‘You believe in my God?’
‘No.’
BANG Dead.
‘My God has a bigger dick than your God!’"
-George Carlin
The living Earth will be fine, and has recovered from worse than us, even other runaway mutations from within that wreaked havoc, see the carboniferous period and the trees that couldn’t yet effectively decompose and release their carbon, doing the opposite of us, creating an ice age.
The Earth recovers, It just won’t recover on a timescale we can perceive.
There’s life that’s evolved to survive in acid pools, at depths we can’t touch, in crevices we can’t reach. We arrogantly fashion ourselves Gods of this world, but we couldn’t sterilize it if we wanted to.
We will be gone, sooner rather than later because of our actions, but the 3.8 billion year old living Earth will be fine with a negligible few million years of cleanup, and to paraphrase George Carlin, it will be like we never even existed at all, thank goodness for that.
The ones we just hunt to extinction are the lucky ones.
We put the ones we find cute when we “develop” their land into cages, and force them to breed despite being effectively extinct solely so we can gawk at them for our amusement.
We pump the ones we find delicious with laboratory hormones to make them freakishly obese, and cramp them in factory farms until they’re obese enough to kill.
As far as the rest of the natural world is concerned, we are the monster under the bed.
deleted by creator
I think this is pretty funny in a the capitalist propagandizers are running the nuclear state insane asylum kind of way.