This is actually an older news story, and it does appear as though she recovered from this before her death.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14389544
the system loves cruelty
criminalizing poverty and brutalizing criminals is what spins the wheels of capitalism
Our fault for not being born into rich families, I guess? :\
No, no, no; if you work really hard and really apply yourself, you too can become a titan of industry and make your billions of dollars. If you aren’t at least a millionaire, it’s because you are just too dumb and lazy to succeed. Go back to school, work longer hours, read more books, get better ideas. In the meantime, I’m hungry, flip my burger faster, and what do you mean you want more than $7.25/hour, it’s not like this is a real job.
The biggest /s imaginable.
You all keep saying /s but they never do saying exactly that.
Yeah, I’m just specifying that I’m being sarcastic.
yep, fucking peasants. should know better than to think yourselves the equal of
hereditaryinherited-but-not-as-formally aristocracy.And there’s this evergreen graphic about how rich people get rich according to them vs reality: https://imgflip.com/i/6i57ug
it really is.
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There’s someone out there who thinks this is the way to keep humanity evolving and entirely missing the part about reproduction.
Look the law is the law and police have to enforce the law. Except for their friends and family or city officials. Or if they just don’t feel like enforcing the law. But other than that the law is the law!
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Depends on if she was mentally competent or had competent representation looking out for her.
It’s extremely easy for a 93 YO to fall between the cracks, even with loving family trying to look out for you, because there’s an army of predators looking to take advantage of the feeble elderly, plus the habits of individuality that many elderly cling to instead of asking for help.
And even if she had someone mentally competent, the system can be so convoluted it is easy to miss benefits you qualify for OR, and this is a big one no one talks about, have trouble getting approved for these things in a timely manner that is actually help when they need it. Sorry, it might take 6-24mo for you to get that help.
It takes a lot of human labour to process those applications and organize resources, just being able to get through to someone on the phone to talk about it is hard enough then you have to explain your situation which for someone elderly or with mental health considerations can be difficult, then the call gets passes to someone with more specialist knowledge or authority which again takes, time normally days, and that’s assuming you know what you need and where to ask.
Having someone that actually knows all about the options available and who can make early assessments then-and-there would be a life saver for so many of the most at risk. With ai that’s very possible, obviously not current gen LLMs but as we perfect specialized models with verification and tasking steps they’ll get ever more useful for getting people the help and access to resources they need.
“But then people would just want to be old and disabled in order to not pay their rent.”
- A Republican, probably
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And to be honest, go ahead and fucken do that, please be lazy and stop fucking everyone else’s lives and minds.
She should’ve made more money and saved more when she was younger.
Best regards,
Capitalism
/s
Must have been an avocado toast addict.
No, she’s from the generation that did buy diamonds, and this is how they treated her. She could’ve afforded rent if she hadn’t wasted all her money on stupid shiny rocks. This is why we’re smart for not doing that. /s
This is just how dismissive and callous it is when similar things are said about millennials and zoomers. I feel bad for her. I’d rather be dead than homeless after like 60 years old. At 93, she literally couldn’t survive a week on the streets, and that suits the capitalists just fine since she’s just a net negative number on their spreadsheet, and their entire goal is to maximize that number.
If I make it beyond 50 that’ll be it for me, I know I won’t retire, with society in its current state. I’ll happily drag that spreadsheet down a bit in return.
I think as a species with all the medical advancements in the last hundred years or so, we already live too long as is. Now I’m seeing articles proposing we may live to 120+ with incoming advancements in medicine? Nah, fuck that, I’ll pass.
capitalism is terrorism
Go move to Cuba then.
Among the countries you could have picked, I could not think of one that better supports the idea that capitalism is terrorism the way Cuba has been harrassed for decades for essentially doing some pragmatic reforms - to the point they were forced to side with the USSR to prevent invasion by the US.
Fun Fact:
That happened in Vietnam too. And Libya. And Venezuela… And the Spanish Republic… And
Move to the bottom of a ditch.
Ahh, nice, cordial Lemmy interaction in the morning
Lemmy has the most death threats per user of any social media I’ve ever used. It’s kind of crazy. I guess that’s why user numbers keep trending down. Monthly active users are down 21% on July last year.
You don’t even know what a threat is.
Yeah I have to say the political environment here is getting more and more exhausting as time goes on. Lemmy is developing a 4chan-esque reputation that will keep it from ever really taking off.
Kind of a bummer.
“Lemmy is politically hostile”
receives downvotes, insults, and death theats
Yeah……
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Generally speaking, the idea isn’t to yell at the shitlibs unless they’re saying shitlib things. When they’re being polite enough you just hit them with history.
For the purposes of this thread, I’m a commenter on Lemmy who’s tired of overtly hostile users harassing anyone who doesn’t align with their chosen stance.
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Just as much as USSR and Stalin are proof socialism is genocide.
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Dude holy shit
Just Lemmy stuff 😃
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Violent revolutions have only worked in rural areas.
Thankfully, chances are the people taken care of would be psychos like you, who would kill people over internet comments ;)
Careful not to cut yourself on that edge.
dumb response to dumb comment
Weak troll. Troll harder
Mate, you condone calling people terrorists but consider edgy telling someone to move. I can’t troll a troll.
Nobody called anyone a terrorist. OP identified an economic ideology as terrorism.
And yeah, it’s middle-school-cringe-level edginess to simp for capitalism by telling someone else to move to a different country. Especially when that particular line of fallacious thinking was debunked decades ago.
If you’re feeling targeted by that comment calling out capitalism, that’s your deal; you’re free to be a capitalism fanboy, but just know that the billionaires will never love you back.
You are saying it as if it was a real suggestion. It was an attempt at equally ridiculous comment as calling our entire economic model terrorism.
Cuba makes a huge amount of money from the tourism industry and it doesn’t all get redistributed to the people according to their needs. Just because a country calls itself a communist country doesn’t mean it’s true. Believe it or not, the DPRK is not actually democratic or a republic.
Cuba is absolutely a Socialist country. The vast majority of industry is centrally planned by the state. There have been some market reforms to help participate in the global economy after the dissolution of the USSR, but there isn’t a Borgeoisie class in power.
This is ideological purity taken beyond rational extremes, if you believe any amount of Capitalism in a country is sufficient to call it Capitalist, then you would disagree with Marx, who advocated for gradually building up the productive forces so that Communism can be meaningfully achieved, and which also requires global Socialism.
Let me tell you a little secret (that is a lie, it just basic logic). The reason every “communist country” is in name only is because a real one can’t exist. Not for any real length of time anyway. As long as the system requires humans to make decisions, they will make selfish decisions. And socialism just make it so much easier for few decision makers to take all the power.
Wait, are you talking about socialism or communism?
Both. It applies to both if they are at the extreme end. Socialism has extra steps.
And to be absolutely clear, I mean socialism with no capitalistic elements. An in the middle system is what I am advocating from the start.
What are these “Capitalistic Elements” that mean you cannot have Socialism?
The greedy motivations of decision makers being aligned with prosperity for the people and separated from lawmaking power.
How do you make a successful company? Sell good cheap things to the people. You get filthy rich, but people have good cheap products to buy that would not exist otherwise. And they get their share in form of wages.
Government needs to be separate to be able to legislate worker protections such as minimal wage, work safety, etc.
So… capitalism is bad and if you do not like it, move to Cuba which is still capitalist?
yes, that is the stupidity of it. Saying you want to live in True Communism is like saying you want to live in Narnia. Might sound nice, but it is not possible
You were the one who said it though…
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Why would “making selfish decisions” be worse in a collectively owned system where industry is run by the public, than in a Capitalist system where the only decisions made are selfish ones?
What kind of purely vibes-based analysis is this?
true, at least she wouldn’t be in jail for the crime of not being able to work with 93
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True. Go move then. Or any other non capitalist country.
No? Maybe those are worse than capitalism and we should try to fix it instead of calling everyone terrorists? Ok then.
nah, corporations are literally evil, as in no morals evil
Fire is also no morals evil. Corporations are tools. Dangerous but powerful tools. You use them poorly and you end up with corporations murdering union leaders and poisoning communities. You don’t use them at all and you end up with breadlines and authoritarianism.
nah, fire is just the propagation of exothermic reactions.
Corporations require intent, they are designed to literally strip any moral consideration from their actions.
PS: about that breadlines and authoritarianism, the US has had plenty of breadlines, and still does to this day, also authoritarians love corporations, after all corporations are inherently authoritarian.
Corporations don’t do moral consideration by their nature, just like fire. You can say it was “by design” for corporations and coincidence for fire, but that is a distinction without difference. Irrelevant for the argument.
And funnily enough, having many authoritarians in a system surprisingly results in much less authoritarian system than having just one. That is why the 3 branches of government are split and it is why I don’t know of any true democracy that is not capitalistic. The authoritarians keep each other in check.
Breadlines happened in the Great Depression. They happened because of Capitalism and Corporations.
Do you believe history is a real thing that impacts where countries are development-wise, or do you believe colonialism, imperialism, and destructive geopolitical policies are fake and do not exist?
Do you think that if Cuba turned Capitalist it would suddenly become a fully developed country like in Western Europe or America overnight? Why?
Then take a look at China as an example. Its explosive growth started when it embraced capitalism (authoritarian flavor, but capitalism). Before that it more or less stagnated. Capitalism is obviously not the only requirement but it is a necessary one.
China grew steadily under Mao, but was not an industrialized economy. Under Deng, Capitalistic market reforms took place and foreign Capital was brought in to speed up development, but as you’ve said, the State still maintains dominance over the economy.
Capitalism is not necessary for development. Humanity developed for thousands of years pre-Capitalism, which itself is only a few hundred years old. You do not require individual mini-dictators competing for higher and higher profits in order to develop, industry can be run by the collective.
It just can’t be at scale. Would be lovely if it could.
People who don’t own something have no incentive to improve it. A factory run by a collective will always prioritize wages over modernizing equipment etc.
People will not invest into new ventures if they don’t get profits, prioritizing luxuries/lifestyle instead.
Cuba that is self sufficient and has the best healthcare in the world? As well as the most beautiful beaches? Yeah it’s on my list if countries to flee to when Trump wins my dude.
Enjoy continuing to live in this shithole country.
If it is so great, why wait for Trump to win? A second time?
Cuba is doing well despite brutal Imperialist sanctions from the US, but is not a developed country yet. People are driven by their Material Conditions, and are products of their Material Conditions, so it does not make sense to move from a developed to a developing country purely out of ideological purity.
Instead, people should try to shape the State they live in to be more equitable. Changing a Capitalist country to Socialist is a good thing.
decommodify housing already. wtf is wrong with people.
…How does that work? Who pays for the lumber, cement, electrical, plumbing, etc?
The price to build a house is nothing compared to what it will sell for. The selling price is mostly speculation. Housing used to be something you just owned, like a car, we as a society decided it had to be an investment and everything has gone to hell since.
Tell that to my home insurance. Replacement cost is more than what my home has ever been appraised.
Oh sure, it will be hard. But we have done lots of hard things. Maintaining a road system is very expensive. The government has built aircraft carriers. We went to the moon.
Being hard and expensive has never stopped the government before. It’s just a matter of whether or not we want to do it.
Insurance is a government mandated scam. Are you surprised that a scam is in fact a scam?
What?
I fail to see what is confusing. Insurance is a scam. You have it because the government makes you have it. So of course a grifter is going to grift.
Housing insurance how it is is a scam you’re right but the insurance itself is not. If they could operate ethically (they cannot) then everything would be fine.
I’m confused because I’m unfamiliar with any governments in the US that require homeowners or renters insurance. The closest I can think of is that FNMA or FMAC backed mortgages would surely require insurance to cover their collateral, but the government doesn’t require that you have a mortgage backed by either of those.
So… what are you talking about with “the government makes you have it”?
Also, how is it a scam? If you want to insure against a risk, you can choose to purchase an insurance policy against that risk. Sure, the insurer wants to make some profit off of that, but government insurance regulations and competition both help to keep that profit in check a bit…
Well, why do you think the price of houses goes up while most other commodities go down. Except for… education, healthcare, and cars in the past 20 years. It feels a little like to me the government backed lending(among other things) has something to do with it. Something something- taking a low interest loan means you’re less concerned about a 20% higher price, and so is everyone else- or something.
What commodities go down? Inflation ensures that that’s not common.
Cars, new ones at least, depreciate in value the second you drive off the lot in one. This depreciation will slow down after about five years, and stop after 10, after which the car is essentially worthless. At that point the value of the vehicle is dependent upon your care and maintenance of it, the equity you put into keeping it pristine, until eventually the vehicle reaches “classic” status and is worth more as a museum piece. Of course that won’t be until long after you’ve died and left the vehicle to your children, who leave it to theirs, who leave it to theirs, and so on. So, you will never get to enjoy the money of the sale your once-new car after about 50 years of appreciating in value after it becomes a “classic” car.
Maybe, mabye not. If you buy the worst car that is for sale today…and keep it in good running condition by do frequent maintenance, in 30 years you’ll have a very interesting classic.
For example if you bought a Dodge Omni in 1990, or a Chevrolet Citation in 1985, you’d have a very interesting and unique car today.
Yeah, but it would only have value to collectors.
I’m talking about inflation adjusted price
Where this type of lending is less frequent, like mobile homes, prices haven’t risen as much. But as that lending has gotten more common, they’re starting to.
Education went up in cost because nothing was stopping it from going up and everything else is so broken it took the place for it. Kids need therapy and they can’t get it, so schools hire therapists. Kids come into higher ed unready so schools has to hire tutors and offer basic classes. No walkability so here comes a campus bus system. Systematic racism so here comes 8 offices of diversity. A nasty combo of unlimited money and mission creep. Want to stop it? Limit the salary of all uni employees to no more than say 110k a year, stop subsidizing the NFL, and fix all the shit that isn’t working around the ages of 18-23.
Healthcare went up because insurance companies. They are a useless middlemen.
Cars really haven’t gone up that much.
You left out the parallel police and court systems that can only inflict academic punishments but have greatly reduced due process rights and rights of the accused in general. To the point that they had to lose lawsuits over things like the accused being allowed to know what evidence will be brought against them or what the procedure is supposed to look like or what training those involved in conducting the procedure had on it.
Biden’s changes to the policy actually rolled back the idea that maybe the people whose roles are analogous to prosecutor, judge and defense in a “real” court should not all be the same person, but then he basically rolled back to the Obama-era version of the policy, except where the changes were just spelling out something from a court judgement.
Education went up in cost because nothing was stopping it from going up and everything else is so broken it took the place for it.
Well yeah, that’s my point? Why do you think their customers are able to pay any amount? Because they’re taking government loans.
Healthcare went up because insurance companies. They are a useless middlemen.
How did insurance companies increase the cost of healthcare when their goal is to decrease it so they can profit more?
Cars really haven’t gone up that much.
New and used cars definitely haven’t gone down in price despite increased mechanization, improved shipping, etc. But yeah out of these things they have the lowest infinite free money behind them.
Well yeah, that’s my point? Why do you think their customers are able to pay any amount? Because they’re taking government loans.
No it is because stuff around it was broken.
How did insurance companies increase the cost of healthcare when their goal is to decrease it so they can profit more?
Expensive for us not for them. Given that insurance doesn’t actually payout the cost doesn’t matter to them.
When you decommodify a thing the state takes a role to ensure the good or service is provided to all. You can have a mixed system with private and public construction. But as long as there is a robust public housing sector, prices for all houses will be much lower than in the current system where we have scarcity.
I read something recently analyzing what tends to happen when there’s tons of artificially cheap public housing. Market forces determine housing prices regardless of government interference, so when the govt rules by decree that their public housing will be cheaper, the price differential doesn’t go away, it just changes form. And more importantly, it changes hands. The price difference changes form from money into power, and it changes hands from the landlord into the govt agency or official in charge of determining who gets to live there and benefit from the lower cost. Make sense?
I don’t disagree that housing costs are out of control. I think everyone is missing the point though, and the cause. It isn’t mean rich people being evil bastards charging people too much. Right now what we are seeing is the natural result of decades of exponential economic growth. Real estate is an asset like any other with prices strongly positively correlated with other asset classes. If everything is growing exponentially like equities, of course real estate is going to grow along with them. I don’t know what the solution is, but it certainly isn’t anything suggested in this thread.
So instead of having people spend 60% of their income on housing we will have some slightly annoyed people who aren’t in the neighborhood they want to be in, spending <20% of their income on housing. Sounds like an improvement to me.
No, all you’re doing is shifting power from the big bad mean rich landlord into the hands of the government agency or agent in charge. How do you not understand that? No matter what there’s going to be an asshole with too much power/wealth.
Ideally the governnent with our tax money instead of using it all to bomb nations that aren’t a threat to us and lining the pockets of politicians and their friends.
Man it’s always govt with you people. I challenge you to codify your feelings into actual policy with facts and figures rather than loaded emotional imagery like ‘govt should pay for housing for everyone.’
the US had a fairly successful public housing program until the 1980s when it was defunded then the coffin was nailed shut with the faircloth amendment passed in the 1990s.
What’s the faircloth amendment?
It bars the government from increasing the amount of public housing anywhere beyond 1999 levels.
I don’t understand how comments like this are made. Is the status-quo so deeply ingrained in people’s minds that they literally can’t even think of any alternate method, or was there not even any consideration put into it to try to?
Does literally every action, in your mind, come back to profit? Have you never helped a friend just because it was the right thing to do? Why should our system of focusing on profit be the only consideration when regular people can obviously consider more noble goals, such as good or happiness, as end goals to chase themselves? Clearly the system that promotes profit over these more noble ideas is the issue, right?
You didn’t answer the question.
But I did? Profit shouldn’t be the goal ideally, so “who pays” isn’t a valid question. Whatever system is in power incentivizes it. Either the community supports them for their good work or the government gives them whatever for it.
Assuming we don’t actually change the system though, we can incentivize it using tax money. Pay people to do the right thing, instead of making the most profitable thing doing evil. As long as profit is the goal, and we don’t correct it with some external force at least, we get assholes trying to benefit themselves instead of trying to help other people. Why should we accept that that is how things need to be?
Who pays is a very valid question because right now you guys are all saying the owner should pay instead of the squatter. Then you go on to talk about tax money which implies the govt should pay. We live in a world of finite goods and resources which is why things are the way they are. These comments are like letters to Santa.
They’re like letters to Santa if Santa were alive and perfectly capable of delivering the presents if he just did what he should. There’s finite resources, but there’s still far more than enough to go around.
Right, if only this mean rich person would go against their best interest and do something stupid. But they didn’t because there’s zero incentive to do so, because what you and everyone in this thread is suggesting is a bad decision to make of one’s own free will. So other folks are arguing the gov should step in and, what, force the owner to rent their unit to the squatter for free just because she’s old I guess?
I challenge you to codify your position. Meaning, if someone is over X years of age they get free rent? Or the gov pays their rent? Or if someone is over such and such net worth they have to give free rent to people? Or something? You’re just not making any sense and you’re arguing out of pure pathos, emotionally laden incoherent thoughts that you can’t build a functioning economy out of.
The state, via taxation.
The government. We could afford it if we weren’t always causing chaos around the world.
You can afford even more with the chaos you cause around the world.
We can afford it with all of the Imperialism we commit, our rent is much higher than it would need to be if profit wasn’t the motive.
One way would be to stop enforcing private property privileges for one’s second house. We already have more housing than people, and thus don’t need to subsidize additional construction.
The billions and billions of our tax dollars we spend on our military are largely used to make weapon manufacturers more wealth.
You could easily provide healthcare for all and housing for all with that money and still have a huge surplus of cash.
The basic math there obviously doesn’t jive if you take a second to think about it. Even if it’s 1/10 of the population, the defense budget is only about $20k per person which is not nearly enough money to change anything.
The healthcare budget (about 5x the defense budget) should be plenty to provide healthcare if it wasn’t for privatized insurance mucking the whole thing up
Everyone always jumps to defense spending which is not the problem. Defense spending creates hundreds of thousands of well paying jobs to American citizens. The large majority of the money used to produce military goods goes back into the economy.
You can shift from blowing up the third world to infrastructure if US jobs are a concern. High speed rail would be nice, same with green energy.
if it wasn’t for privatized insurance mucking the whole thing up
Insurance companies aren’t saints, but their whole goal is to keep costs for themselves low so they can pocket the premiums. A lot of factors go into driving up health care costs, this is nowhere near all of them but to name a few: AMA keeping residency slots low to control supply of doctors and keep wages high, high educational cost meaning doctors require higher pay, long education needed(high lead time on new medical staff, doctors have some of the longest educational time in the US of anywhere in the world), intellectual property law enforcing drug monopolies, extremely expensive FDA approval process, (?)expensive FDA certification of some equipment(this I’m not entirely sure about- but I suspect its the case), Certificate of Need laws restricting competition in some areas.
Everyone always jumps to defense spending which is not the problem. Defense spending creates hundreds of thousands of well paying jobs to American citizens. The large majority of the money used to produce military goods goes back into the economy.
Sorry to say Keynesian economics died.
Other than that, the first part of your comment is right.
The number of residency slots is actually controlled by Congress as residencies are funded through Medicare. The AMA has been trying to fight back against and regulate privately funded residencies like the ones started by HCA. Those ones were created as a way to exploit residents’ labor and are of such poor quality that HCA won’t even hire their own graduates.
The AMA doesn’t directly control it, what it does do is lobby congress to limit it. The AMA actually is the reason the cap was put in place in 1997. Doctor administrators are also often AMA members/supporters/in some capacity bound to the AMA, so they often don’t explore other sources of funding than government for expanding residency capacity.
I’m curious as to where you are getting that information. There are other explorations into funding for residency slots as it tends to benefit the institutions that have the residencies, but the issue is that there needs to be a guarantee of funding in perpetuity in order to create the slot, and many offered funding sources either cannot guarantee that perpetuity or they only offer the money with a lot of strings attached.
I’m a medical student member of the AMA and I frequently get emails from them asking for my participation in lobbying campaigns to increase the number of residency slots. (I have written to my representatives about it a couple of times, but I don’t really have the time or resources to do much else.) The individual colleges and fellowships are also advocating for their own specialties. The ACEP and ACOEP (American College of (Osteopathic) Emergency Physicians) are both investing a lot into advocacy campaigns for the specialty.
America has great public housing, free meals and they even provide everyone with a job. I just don’t understand why residents need to wear those funny orange suits.
Equal treatment. Can’t accuse of inequality if everyone dresses the same. As for why orange, because it’s a warm, neutral colour that can more easily turn to brown or red as needed.
Just a risk of mysterious death and missing organs if you complain about abuse
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These issues are systemic. I don’t like cops anymore than the next guy. But if the cop didn’t do his job, another cop would do it for him.
Big corpos are not going to stop being shitty the moment they lose their law enforcement friends either.
Exactly. They only rely on police because for the time being it’s cheaper and more cost effective to outsource their violence to the state. The minute they can cut out the middleman, they will.
It’s not just about being cost effective - the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Private firms doing this without state backing would be immediately read by anyone watching as illegitimate and they would quickly face organised resistance to it.
The unrestrained mass of people organising is a much more powerful force than any police a state could muster. That’s why the state has to find ways to legitimise itself so as to be allowed to stay in power.
Corporations don’t have that level of cultural legitimacy yet, and we should hope they never get there.
Thankfully, that monopoly on legitimate violence is one that the people can give and take. If the people decide that the state’s violence is illegitimate, then it is illegitimate.
Yup, I was going to make the distinction between perceived legitimacy and actual legitimacy, but on reflection I think legitimacy is socially constructed, so perceived legitimacy is just legitimacy.
That’s why things like the George Floyd uprising was so important. The legitimacy of the state’s violence has taken a huge hit in recent times, and I don’t see it getting better any time soon.
Cruelty is the point. Keep people subservient, keep them worried for their own life and the lives of their loved ones.
You’re less likely to complain about work requiring 20 hours of unpaid overtime if that means you can’t put food on the table for your family.
But which people directly involved in any of these things went to the convention or training seminars about cruelty maximization.
Painting it like that makes it seem deliberate but that’s not what the real problem is, it’s a broken systems that needs to be carefully unpacked and constructed in a way that works - as much as we want to imagine heroics unfortunayely just going in and beating up badguy goons like we’re batman isn’t going to help
Greed and cruelty are inherent traits in some people, no seminar necessary.
Painting it like that makes it seem deliberate but that’s not what the real problem is
Yes it is. The system isn’t broken, it functions perfectly to benefit those greedy cruel people.
Problem is those people exist in every system. Bad apples and all that.
Can’t you see how shareholders are suffering here? Have a heart!
But the poor landlords!
Sort of the joke in Western countries. We took all the absolutely critical domestic infrastructure that we all agree needs to be funded and we all rely on to exist and passed it off to the most greedy sociopath assholes we could find.
Now we’re shocked to discover that our planes crash and our retirement homes price gouge and our tech companies just do fake money scams to the tune of $2.5 trillion dollars. Our local sports teams are all run by a big casino. Our universities are all run by sports team owners. Our domestic energy companies keep getting pranked by the fake money scammers, while complaining that environmentalists just made the price of natural gas go vertical. And our health care system is six hedge funds in a set of doctor’s scrubs.
But when push comes to shove, if you ask an American why this country seems to be circling the drain, the answer is some combination of “Woke Communist Joe Biden put transgenders in charge of the military industrial complex” and “Cheeto Mussolini Donald Trump gave Putin/Xi the sticky note with all our passwords on it, right after Barack Obama had fixed everything.”
You’d never even know Blackrock Financial, Goldman Sachs, Citadel Advisors, and Berkshire Hathaway exist, much less why they have more control over the global economy than any two dozen elected officials you could name.
the real reason why american has gone down the shitter, ironically, is the existence of political parties. The parties ironically haven’t done anything themselves, though they’re trying to. It’s the lack of action outside of the parties that’s causing it.
If we weren’t so fucking laser focused on calling people idiots for no reason, we’d have a productive and healthy society. But no the elites have their own class, and they give us this shitty fodder to play with while bored, and we just fucking eat it up like pigs in a feed trough.
political parties are symptomatic of voting systems. That is to say the number of political parties a place has depends on the kind of voting system it has.
yup
the real reason why american has gone down the shitter, ironically, is the existence of political parties.
I don’t know if I’m going to pin a failing economic model on the existence of organized political groups. That’s a hair’s breath shy of blaming poor economic policies on the existence of governments.
If we weren’t so fucking laser focused on calling people idiots for no reason
Its rarely for no reason. Mystifying the political process by asserting you have to be a Smartie to understand it is a method of Other-ing and alienating people from any kind of activism or intervention. Its a deliberate rhetorical technique intended to push people out of government.
we just fucking eat it up like pigs
We eat it up like pigs when the denouncement is aimed at the opposition. We recoil in offense when its aimed at us.
One of the big hopes of social media was to better organize and empower large groups of people by rapidly getting them up to speed on how political systems and effective interventions work. But Web2 and Web3 centralization of media, combined with a bunch of COINTELPRO style harassment of larger outside groups, has destroyed the foundations that local communities tried to build up in the 90s/00s.
This gets us back to big corporate interests simply owning everything. If you need to suck Elon’s cock in order to get any kind of positive media exposure on Twitter, the only political organizers with any effective purchase are going to be the current batch of white nationalists and tech bro sychophants Elon loves. Same with Facebook/Instagram/Threads and Google search results and Microsoft’s pet AI project ChatGPT.
If it looks like we’re eating like pigs, it might be because all we’re ever fed is slop.
I don’t know if I’m going to pin a failing economic model on the existence of organized political groups. That’s a hair’s breath shy of blaming poor economic policies on the existence of governments.
let’s have a think on it, why would the economic model be failing? Because it’s profitable for the people with the money, and those in government. Why would the government be busy not preventing this? Why would companies be pushing for this? And why wouldn’t the general public be pushing AGAINST this? Because we’re too busy complaining about how trump deregulated the economy, making things harder, as well as the other side complaining about how joe biden fucked up the economy by [insert argument here]
Its rarely for no reason. Mystifying the political process by asserting you have to be a Smartie to understand it is a method of Other-ing and alienating people from any kind of activism or intervention. Its a deliberate rhetorical technique intended to push people out of government.
exactly, and it’s also why we keep fucking falling for it, because we’re idiots that can’t see the hook through the bait. You think the parties are productive when the vast majority of their time is spent on completely irrelevant shit? No, they’re not. That’s not why they do it, they do it because if they do, then they don’t have to fucking do anything, because we’ll all be preoccupied bombing abortion centers or churches or whatever the fuck we’re supposed to be doing.
We eat it up like pigs when the denouncement is aimed at the opposition. We recoil in offense when its aimed at us.
One of the big hopes of social media was to better organize and empower large groups of people by rapidly getting them up to speed on how political systems and effective interventions work. But Web2 and Web3 centralization of media, combined with a bunch of COINTELPRO style harassment of larger outside groups, has destroyed the foundations that local communities tried to build up in the 90s/00s.
This gets us back to big corporate interests simply owning everything. If you need to suck Elon’s cock in order to get any kind of positive media exposure on Twitter, the only political organizers with any effective purchase are going to be the current batch of white nationalists and tech bro sychophants Elon loves. Same with Facebook/Instagram/Threads and Google search results and Microsoft’s pet AI project ChatGPT.
If it looks like we’re eating like pigs, it might be because all we’re ever fed is slop.
pretty much this exactly.
why would the economic model be failing? Because it’s profitable for the people with the money, and those in government.
The capitalist economic model is failing because of the law of diminishing returns coming into contradiction with the demand for higher next quarter profits. Individual sectors of the economy with the most leverage can raise their rents, but only at the expense of other areas of the economy. So Boeing can sell shittier airplanes by purging its staff of skilled engineers, but this creates downturns in neighborhoods where those engineers live. And it also scares people away from flying commercial airlines.
This was immediately profitable for Boeing (10 years ago). But its been awful for Boeing right now. And even worse for a government that needs Boeing’s airplanes to maintain both commercial and military aviation roles. Folks with money in Boeing stock also aren’t thrilled with this turn.
Why would the government be busy not preventing this?
Because government officials surrendered their role in manufacturing and regulating aircrafts to Boeing itself, on the theory that Boeing management would not behave shortsightedly. Oops!
Now the engineers who are blowing the whistle are showing up in court rooms (when they aren’t killing themselves in the middle of a deposition) and government agencies are scrambling to figure out how to do jobs they haven’t had to do in decades. But its a big ship and slow to turn.
we’re idiots that can’t see the hook through the bait
We’re blind men feeling at an elephant. Its a big problem and when one guy’s got the tail and another’s touching the tusk, it may not seem like the same thing to everyone.
That’s not because we’re all stupid. Its because the problem is big and the solution is hard. But the process to solving the problem requires teamwork. That’s where Americans tend to suck hardest.
Because we all assume the other guy is stupid, I describe the tusk and you describe the tail, and we both accuse one another of not knowing what we’re touching.
The capitalist economic model is failing because of the law of diminishing returns coming into contradiction with the demand for higher next quarter profits. Individual sectors of the economy with the most leverage can raise their rents, but only at the expense of other areas of the economy. So Boeing can sell shittier airplanes by purging its staff of skilled engineers, but this creates downturns in neighborhoods where those engineers live. And it also scares people away from flying commercial airlines.
This was immediately profitable for Boeing (10 years ago). But its been awful for Boeing right now. And even worse for a government that needs Boeing’s airplanes to maintain both commercial and military aviation roles. Folks with money in Boeing stock also aren’t thrilled with this turn.
and squeezing as much money out the people of a community is useful to those who have the money to then buy up that community. Gentrification. This all inevitably leads to economic collapse being profitable to rich people, and those who enable them. I.E. corporations and the government.
Because government officials surrendered their role in manufacturing and regulating aircrafts to Boeing itself, on the theory that Boeing management would not behave shortsightedly. Oops!
Now the engineers who are blowing the whistle are showing up in court rooms (when they aren’t killing themselves in the middle of a deposition) and government agencies are scrambling to figure out how to do jobs they haven’t had to do in decades. But its a big ship and slow to turn.
probably also related to lobbying money, i’m almost certain that boeing lobbied for this, so that they could make more money, possibly even gave money directly to politicians. Boeing is probably in the middle of lobbying right now even.
That’s not because we’re all stupid. Its because the problem is big and the solution is hard. But the process to solving the problem requires teamwork. That’s where Americans tend to suck hardest.
it’s probably because we allow corporations to lobby the government and decide shit for us instead of doing it ourselves. But that’s another problem.
Because we all assume the other guy is stupid, I describe the tusk and you describe the tail, and we both accuse one another of not knowing what we’re touching.
you’re assuming that i’m calling anyone specifically stupid, i’m not. My point is literally that WE, us, me and you, are sitting here, yelling about the technicalities about the actual problems, which we both agree exist. Rather than simply doing something about it. I assume that’s also your point however. In which case, stalemate?
Rather than simply doing something about it.
Do you have any recommendations?
if you ask an American why this country seems to be circling the drain
You could always ask. I know that I’m not the usual American but I’d say that the reason (and reason why nothing of note has been done about it since neoliberalism set its hooks) is as simple as the increase in wealth disparity.
That’s definitely a consequence of current policy, but it isn’t the cause.
We have domestic policies and social structures that encourage wealth aggregation. And we have certain administrative heads that champion these policies.
If you want to get to the deepest of root causes, it’s definitely anti-social mental illnesses exhibited by those seeking and holding power, leading them to be driven to gorge on more and more.
Any higher than that, I’d still argue that wealth/power/resource disparity is the cause of the vast majority of societal problems. From crime, to healthcare access, to homelessness, and invasive, privacy-violating tech. They all come back to one thing: people don’t have enough resources, despite there being more than enough to do around. The disparity enables those with the lions’ share of resources to leverage them to extract even more, in a cycle that we’ve been seeing since at least Reagan’s union busting days.
it’s definitely anti-social mental illnesses exhibited by those seeking and holding power
That’s more a survivorship bias. People with anti-social issues have an easier time maximizing the profitability of their financial ventures.
Its also why so much modern business has to happen in increasingly alienated fashion. Don’t own a sweatshop, invest in one. Don’t invest in a sweatshop, invest in H&M stock. Don’t invest in H&M stock, invest in a textiles ETF. Don’t invest in the textile industry, just give your money to a professional investment advisor. The farther away you get, the less the consequences of your actions will haunt you. The whole system is designed to hide the messy details from the people moving the money.
Also a big reason why we have a bunch of AgGag laws in big farming states. Can’t let people who buy the meat see how the sausage is made.
They all come back to one thing: people don’t have enough resources, despite there being more than enough to do around. The disparity enables those with the lions’ share of resources to leverage them to extract even more, in a cycle that we’ve been seeing since at least Reagan’s union busting days.
Absolutely true. But even before Reagan, the old 1950s/60s union leadership was selling out its base in the name of American nationalism. Truman and then Eisenhower spent their respective terms empowering Hoover’s FBI to purge all the Lefties from labor. Hollywood got its blacklists. Universities were purged of their Marxist professors. Shop floors had to denounce the IWW before they could win contracts with the more business-aligned AFL.
By the time Reagan started cracking knees at the FAA, the spine of the labor movement had already been broken.
That’s more a survivorship bias. People with anti-social issues have an easier time maximizing the profitability of their financial ventures.
I think that we’re actual nearly in agreement. To clarify, when I say “anti-social mental illnesses”, I don’t necessarily mean Anti-Social Personality Disorder (not discounting it either but, it’s likely more complex than just that and it’s a topic that I am not aware of seeing much study because those afflicted are considered models of “success”). Rather, I mean that these individuals are exhibiting behaviors that are knowingly detrimental to the society and the human species for individual gain (most often gain that could be greater and more sustainable without anti-social behavior).
Also, please note that I’m not trying to say “mental illness” is the cause of all of the world’s wrongs. Myself and just about everyone that I am close to have some form of mental illness and/or neurodivergence and I can guarantee that we’re not the cause (nor have we heard of a secret society called The Stonecutters /s).
Rather, I mean that these individuals are exhibiting behaviors that are knowingly detrimental to the society and the human species for individual gain
If you want to get really anthropological and take a long lens view, this is a process of speciation. Humans as accidental super-predators give rise to the Homo Capitalismi, an apex predator who annihilates the parent species in the same way humans annihilated millions of other species.
Also, please note that I’m not trying to say “mental illness” is the cause of all of the world’s wrongs.
Fair enough. I’ve heard more than a few folks suggest the medicalization of the market mechanic, wherein we can have our free markets if we just get all the CEOs on enough mood altering chemicals. Glad you’re not on that track.
Myself and just about everyone that I am close to have some form of mental illness and/or neurodivergence and I can guarantee that we’re not the cause (nor have we heard of a secret society called The Stonecutters /s).
A shame, really. Their music slaps.
And the people that did it went right back into the office the next day prob saying “oh I feel so sorry for her anyways what we getting for lunch?”
But shareholder value!
ACAB
all capitalists are bad
