At the risk of sounding like a class reductionist (I’m not), even things like racism and LGBTphobia are exacerbated by this, because the only reason we don’t just eat those ten guys is we’re always hating each other. The reason there’s so much racism in the US, for example, has a lot to do with slavery – and guess who benefitted from slavery? Guess who benefitted from the genocide against Native Americans? Who benefits most from calling refugees and undocumented workers “illegal immigrants”?
It’s not me. If you’re reading this, it’s probably not you. It hurts us. It hurts our communities, while these ten people keep brainwashing us into actually defending them and their system while hating each other.
(Ok now I’m going to have my coffee, and I wish to the gods that I could disable inbox notifications after posting this.)
Why do you fear that lol?
Divide and conquer is a thing older than a sum of this thread’s ages. If there’s no constant infights and smaller issues, we’d figure things out and switch to them. When a poor white guy covers himself in blankets and burn crosses, they laught and applaud, because hating other poor guys is what would occupy him for life. They fund hatred for it lets them stay in power, it brings them easy wins against ‘the mysterious other’ people fear or don’t understand. It props them up alright.
Take insanely long copyright holders and LLMs from the thread I’ve read previously. We start to take sides and defend overwhelmingy rich companies from which none of them would probably suffer, and both of these suck ass. That’d hold us from regulating each at the same time, if anywhen.
Even coke and pepsi sold and sell us their rivalry as a way to up loyalty to their brand. Generating unrest is a good tool in their box. And I don’t think it’s a controversial opinion. Especially in economics and politics.
It may not be as bad here, but there are a shit ton of people who defend inherently destructive systems like capitalism, or who excuse systemic racism or transphobia. I’ve encountered them a lot, even here in the fediverse.
And now I understand you. I’ve seen persons fanboying for my fucking state, and I’m still open to switch places with them. They aren’t so enthusiastic about it after I propose that.
Either way, I wasn’t disagreeing with you at all.
Yeah, I get it. Personally, I live in the US, but we’re not so great either.
Personally, I think all states and hierarchies are destructive, but I’m willing to talk to people online who at least agree that oppressive systems like capitalism and authoritarianism are bad, as a baseline. In real life, I’m more open to conversing with people and debating ideologies, but being online is my escape from this fascist hellscape where I live.
Same here. It seeds some hope when you doubt either you or everyone gone insane.
Wishing the best to you. I keep trying to make things better, and maybe at some point after I’m gone, they will. I like what I’m seeing and hearing from a lot of younger people, so at least there’s that.
True to you. Best of luck too.
I am very much a class reductionist. Or a class-first leftist, as I prefer to call it. It is absolutely the most important issue, by a colossal margin.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” – Lyndon Johnson
I live in the Bible belt and people 100% think a trans kid socially transitioning with a new haircut and different pronoun is a more direct threat to their livelihood than their boss giving them a 1% raise in a 5% inflation environment.
Same. We are surrounded by abject poverty and massive social problems. We could work to address those issues… But no. Bullying and maligning librarians for bullshit reasons is more important.
That hate propaganda is, in my opinion, more continually perpetuated by them, and in some cases created by them, because it offers, as you say, and I agree, a distraction from the pure evil they are for this planet and all life on it. The super villains have convinced us they’re not the villains. Where’s superman when you need him.
Probably working for a billionaire.
Seriously, why does Lenny not have the ability to disable notifications on posts?
This is very class reductionist. Rich people are still hurt by bigotry, especially celebrities. Not every rich person is a cis, hetero, white, man.
These issues predate capitalism. Not making full use of minorities and oppressed people actually hurts the capitalist economy especially in terms of innovation. It would be much more efficient for the rich if everyone were giving their best.
These divisions are far from the only reason people don’t turn on the rich. People just don’t support socialism and I can see why. Things like the USSR and China are what happened when marxism was tried. We need to come up with better economic and political systems that actually work if we want to get anywhere. We then need to remove the stains these previous systems caused. I don’t think that’s gonna happen with the current crop of leftists as they are idealists still using 100s of years old ideologies.
Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the rich???
You don’t understand what I am saying do you? These issues predate the rich people we have now, and even hurt some of them. Billionaires are still bad people, but they aren’t the only problematic people in societies.
You don’t seem to know what you’re talking about since if anything there’s been a wealth of leftist literature within the past couple of decades, and if anything ideologies such as anarcho-communism and anarcho-primitivism are experiencing a renaissance.
I also find it highly suspect that your first go-to example of leftism is a failed authoritarian state like the Soviet Union rather than groups like the Zapatistas, the anti-fascist movement in the US, Food Not Bombs, many horizontally structured local coalitions, or other much better examples of leftism manifesting in helpful and vibrant ways.
Class reductionism is harmful, though – I’ll agree with you there.
You don’t seem to know what you’re talking about since if anything there’s been a wealth of leftist literature within the past couple of decades, and if anything ideologies such as anarcho-communism and anarcho-primitivism are experiencing a renaissance.
Anarcho-communism comes from Krapotkin, right? He wrote the book on it. He died over 100 years ago. Sure there might have been newer literature but it’s still based on 100+ year old ideology.
Anarchism is better in many ways than Marxism. The issue I have is that they get steam rolled by more organized regimes in places like Kronstadt in the USSR, or what happened to anarchist communes in Spain and Ukraine. I don’t think they can stand up against a well organized army. I would love to be proven wrong obviously. As long as regimes like fascism, marxism, capitalism are still around it will be difficult to make communes stick without some external force to defend them.
I choose the USSR as Marxism is far more popular in the UK (and I think the US too) than Anarchism. It’s the most obvious example of a failed Marxist regime.
Not every rich person is a cis, hetero, white, man.
Don’t give a fuck about rich people regardless of race, sex, or anything else. Just because a group of rich people can also inadvertently harm themselves doesn’t mean they are not effectively 100% to blame.
Things like the USSR and China are what happened when marxism was tried.
The USSR was what happened when dictators pretended to be socialist and victimized their subjects. This has little to do with Marx’ economic theories.
I don’t think that’s gonna happen with the current crop of leftists as they are idealists still using 100s of years old ideologies.
I agree with you here. I’ve started to see the left/right spectrum as not very useful, and the authoritarian/anarchist spectrum more appropriate. If peace, stability, and sustainability are ever achieved, it won’t be at the point of a gun or the order of an authoritarian.
Don’t give a fuck about rich people regardless of race, sex, or anything else. Just because a group of rich people can also inadvertently harm themselves doesn’t mean they are not effectively 100% to blame.
I want evidence rich people caused this mess. It’s said all the time that they are at fault for rascism, sexism, homophobia, etc but never proven. These ideologies go back to slave times, long before the world of capitalism and billionaires. It’s possible some are exploiting existing divisions to suit their own ends, but that’s different from being the sole cause of a problem.
The USSR was what happened when dictators pretended to be socialist and victimized their subjects. This has little to do with Marx’ economic theories.
Then why did it happen in almost every country with a socialist revolution lead by marxists? The USSR is only one example, you could look at China or North Korea for example.
I agree with you here. I’ve started to see the left/right spectrum as not very useful, and the authoritarian/anarchist spectrum more appropriate. If peace, stability, and sustainability are ever achieved, it won’t be at the point of a gun or the order of an authoritarian.
Anarchism is great until a well organized army comes around and invades them. If someone can find a way to build a commune without it getting invaded by tankies or fascists or the USA then I am all ears.
I want evidence rich people caused this mess.
LOL LOL! LOOLLLLLLLLL!
I don’t know why you’d be an apologist for the rich unless you are one. I don’t care much to get into it anymore with someone defending the rich, if you can’t understand this nothing I say would change that. I mean you can’t even see that the issue with the USSR, i.e. a dictator is also a problem in China and N. Korea.
If someone can find a way to build a commune without it getting invaded by tankies or fascists or the USA then I am all ears.
Any tiny group, commune or not, surrounded on all sides by powerful hostile enemies will fail (unless they are tolerated). Anarchism (anarcho-communism) if it’s at all possible, will come from cultural changes on the bottom, not from some privileged commune successfully fighting the world. It will come from economies failing due to people rejecting them and making, growing, and sharing. It will come when people can see that cooperation is superior to mutual exploitation.
IDK if anarchism is possible, but everything other than anarchism involves powerful groups forcing their way on vulnerable populations and I know that’s inherently wrong. I support what’s right, not what’s most likely.
Try to mention that the majority of landlords who go around fixing shit all day are struggling just as much you will get you hung around here.
Mention that the uberrich are the ones behind those firms buying up houses and they want you blaming that 70 year old still fixing shit instead of them.
People are blind to so much shit sometimes and the pendulum swing in other directions like ACAB suddenly being pushed by a bunch of people who couldn’t speak English is the cherry on top to realizing so many people on the left are just as easily swayed as the people being grifted the right.
E: I’d like to see what people think are acceptable amounts of property ownership. Each person gets to own a single property? So I can own two properties and rent one if me and my partner each own, right? I wonder how far housing Co-ops can work.
Anyone in a committed relationship should be able to rent a single property. Nothing guarantees that we won’t break up, so they will need to keep something just in case. It’s also emergency funds for if we lose everything in the stock and people realize the Stock Market doesn’t work without the very thing people thing are arguing against. Unsustainable capitalism. What else do people do then? Go full Ron Swanson and put it all into shiny metal and bury it lol?
Until people start unionizing to the point where people don’t require their work to put into their retirement and get paid enough to actually save so they can’t generate money from hoarding, then you’ll need stock. You’ll need diverse portfolios which include property ownership.
Landlords are not a special case. If you don’t like your job you can quit. Sell the property if it is such a burden.
That’s the point, they often can’t because unlike you and the other people putting money into the magic money making machine which requires unsustainable growth based GDP to work, aka the stock market, they put theirs into equity.
Selling 1-2 houses for $150,000 isn’t going to let them retire lol. They also bought houses for generational income so they can gift them to their children or grandchildren.
And just like the reactionary fun both of you are going with, you pretend like it’s still not a class issue lol.
They’re still part of the rentier class, let’s not start sucking their dicks too hard because they’re petit. They have a contradictory class position, but the fear of returning to the proletariat makes them the worst exploiters of the working class. You see the same thing from small producers under market pressure from supermarkets. Up yo analysis bro.
the majority of landlords who go around fixing shit all day are struggling just as much you
Nah, this ain’t it, chief. They’re not struggling like me, and they’re exploiting a resource that should be a basic human right for profit. For every landlord who’s tRyInG tO pAy MoM’s NuRsInG hOmE fEeS, there are multiple tenants who can’t because they’re being sucked dry by these vampires.
People can fix shit without exploiting housing.
Edit: YIKES I just saw your username. Blocked, blocked, BLOCKED! Holy fucking shit!
I scrolled up wondering how bad could a username by really ffffuck me that’s tasteless
As I’ve said, the death of nuance lol.
You’re welcome to google the name and find out blankets with smallpox was never a thing though!
E: You’re also welcome to read any number of my well sourced comments or discussions about landlords and class warfare elsewhere.
You’re welcome to google the name and find out blankets with smallpox was never a thing though!
There’s solid historical evidence that it was a thing, on at least one occasion.. The fact that it wasn’t effective—because smallpox doesn’t really spread that way—was probably the biggest reason that it wasn’t a more widespread tactic.
Yes indeed. I have multiple references to that one instance at Fort Pitt in my thread which historians believe to be bullshit.
Blankets with smallpox was never a thing that decimated swaths of natives. Smallpox was able to do that all on it’s own. People weren’t handing them out left and right trying to kill natives. The US government did that all on their own through widespread genocide and cultural erasure.
Blankets with smallpox, was never a thing to deserve it’s cult childish joking status like everyone likes to pretend it did. People repeat it because it sounds plausible and it’s essentially a historical ear worm.
Settlers weren’t handing them out trying to kill people. The US government didn’t have a policy to use them to trick natives. None of it was a thing.
instance at Fort Pitt in my thread which historians believe to be bullshit.
I scanned your links and there was refutation of Churchill’s claim about Plains indians and blankets but there was no refutation of Pitt. Your links only showed corroborating evidence that Pitt happened.
The attempt was made, that’s verified. The actual ability to give someone smallpox via blankets is bullshit. I might have made that more clear. Apologies.
For fixing shit, there are plumbers and electricians and carpenters. They are workers.
Landlord earns money not from fixing, but from renting out a house first and foremost. And this is a passive income, or, to put otherwise, exploiting a resource and dragging money from something that doesn’t produce anything for society.
Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the slumlords!!!
Sort of true. The rich also expand their dynasties. For example, Walmart now supports 10 billionaires instead of 1 as they are the children of the founder. I am sure we have all noticed the lowering of quality in our purchased goods.
Walmart now supports 10 billionaires instead of 1
The Waltons own 20x as much as they did a generation ago and split it among 10 people.
I am sure we have all noticed the lowering of quality in our purchased goods.
Their products were always shit. That was the Walmart gambit. Sell someone a $1 plastic piece of crap for $8 rather than a durable piece of $8 metal for $10. Pocket the difference and claim you saved people money.
But the broader consequence of Walmart and its “Buy up / shut down the competition” model is that everyone who sells to Walmart is obligated to produce crap. Because if you can’t sell to them at $.50, they’re not buying. And if they’re not buying, you lose access to millions of customers.
I think it was either Catepiller or John Deere that had a knock-down drag out fight with Walmart, where they wouldn’t budge on their wholesale price and Walmart began kicking them out of all their stores as a result, that effectively broke the back of the union-lead opposition to price cuts.
This comment makes me wanna rewatch the walmart south park episode :)
Dude, they have fucked up batteries so bad. I have batteries that are 2 years old, new in packaging that are leaking. Almost every time batteries die in a remote, it’s because they exploded.
SUPPORT. SMALL. BUSINESSES.
you might not get very price competitive products, but these companies often still have the consumer in mind.
small online shops, phone companies like fairphone (or even nokia), video streaming platforms like floatplane (dankpods is hilarious).
voting with our wallets is pretty much all we can do.
TIL Nokia still makes phones
Yeah, although I’m not sure why they’re calling Nokia a small business. They’re a publicly traded corporation and my searching tells me their revenue last year was $25 billion.
I was a bit surprised by that statement as well. When someone says “small business,” the first thing I think of is a mom and pop shop.
I’m not sure about ‘online small business’ either. Most of the ones that are not actual corporations are selling via Amazon or eBay or Etsy, so you’re still supporting megacorporations. If you’re lucky, your town still has small businesses you can support with prices you can afford.
And that last part is a big part of the problem. The person above says you might not get very price competitive products. When so many people live paycheck-to-paycheck, you have no choice but to get the most price competitive products.
Consumers should not be shouldering the blame here.
I agree with you. Also, even small local businesses often support the systems that are at the root of the problem. I’m not going out of my way to shop at the local grocery store when the owners are actively harming my community by expressing and supporting all manner of bigotry.
At the farmers’ market in a nearby town, there’s a big to-do because a white supremacist farm opened a stall there and the farmers’ market is allowing it. It even resulted in a second farmers market forming. It’s ridiculous. They should kick the Nazis the fuck out of their farmers’ market.
It’s a really hard concept for some people that by inviting people like Nazis to the table, they are de facto excluding marginalized groups. For people not in one of these groups, I think it takes an effort to understand why that is.
loving this thread here and (most) everything in here! as a tiny ass farmer, that shit doesn’t surprise me. I’ll try to keep this comment specifically focused on an issue we’ve had with “farmer’s” markets:
used to sell at a couple of em before covid, since then, we only sell on-site at our little shop. one of the larger, better markets a few years back starting letting this distributor begin selling at market, masquerading as one of us. they even wore fucking shirts about promoting local blah blah. they weren’t from the area, they buy up bulk stuff (often not in season), then set it out in these pretty baskets like they just got done harvesting it that morning.
people would line up to buy their shit, while the 4-5 actually local ops that are honest and give a shit had to stand by and watch. tried to get the market organizer to care, of course they didn’t. but, hey, people can take pics of their brave treks to the Local Farmers Market to post on the socials, so they can hear how great they are at supporting small businesses.
if I sound bitter, it’s only because I kinda am 😂 carry on, love y’all who look below the surface and go out of your way to build community!
i’m pretty much exclusively ordering stuff from “smaller” online shops that aren’t “mainstream”. i mainly find their products through an amazon link on duckduckgo, but order it on their website. it’s often way cheaper too.
stuff like filament from esun’s store
keychron keyboards on their own website instead of some reseller
and occasionally a reseller, but then it’s usually otto, coolblue, notebooksbilliger, or similar websites. whichever have decent prices.
buying stuff locally is literally impossible in most cases. many stores went insolvent long ago, and the ones still remaining have a 2x markup most of the time. if they even have it in stock.
hobbyist shops might be possible to buy raw materials from, but (my niche of) PC accessories and 3d printing stuff ar hard to come by locally.
I read it as
small ones, or even bigger ones like Nokia
So I think it’s not saying that Nokia is small, but that Nokia is not in the same category as the few big big corporations.
they’re very underrepresented in the phone market atm. the company behind it is huge, but the phones are very customer conscious.
not a small business at all, but still.
They don’t.
I thought so too so I bought one.
They are made by HMD Global which is a bad company that uses generic Foxconn smartphones designs with bad battery life, the worst cameras on the low-mid market, and terrible USB ports, puts shitty unsupported software on it, then licenses the Nokia name to sell to people who can’t afford a mid-tier and don’t know any better because they trust the name.
I had to manually replace the USB-C port on my Nokia 7.1 5 times in 2 years because they refused to offer any support at all when it broke 6 months after I bought it because they quite literally use the cheapest components possible.
Screw HMD Global. Do NOT support them. They are as bad or worse than any big phone company. Buy a Fairphone.
In addition to this, try to support co-operatives, unionized workplaces, and FOSS development! Even go out of your way to try to reject corporations as much as you can, reduce consumerism, and focus on local organization.
All of these help Workers have more power and build up your community.
especially donate to FOSS devs whose software you’re using. even if it’s just a little bit. these people do it out of passion, and your donation will let them continue working on it.
and definetely sign up for a worker’s union.
Before you the only time I had heard people “say vote with your wallet”, were from right leaning family members who are now upset about “cancel culture”
Even entertaining that cancel culture is a thing and not just a reductionist view of accountability in general, then what they’d be describing is voting with your dollar on a larger more organized scale.
Pardon my tangent and I completely agree with you.
i think we should steal that term from them, like we did with “based”.
What were they even doing with “based” before the kids punched up its branding?
I have a question. Is this figure accurate?
No. It’s an exaggeration. But the truth is still obscene:
A 2021 Oxfam report found that collectively, the 10 richest men in the world owned more than the combined wealth of the bottom 3.1 billion people, almost half of the entire world population. Their combined wealth doubled during the pandemic.
Well that’s fun.
Poor defined as $10k-100k is pretty…odd? I don’t know that I’d define people making $100k as poor.
Sure. But I think it’s still a worthwhile evaluation. 100k is not what it used to be by any means unless you are in a low col area.
It’s people who have 100k of total property, not annual salary
I do not understand why not a single politician has talked about THIS. Not in the US, not in Europe, I don’t hear any politicians about this. If they do, they’re whispering because this should be top 5 news next to climate change every day.
Tyler Durden had the right idea. Project Mayhem is what we need.
Tyler Durden’s plan would have only been a reset. The system still remains.
But a reset of a faulty system gives times to re-evaluate and makes it at least work again. Temporarily.
That’s the exact kinda complacency that led to these problems
What a wonderfully crafted sentence. “Complacency” is a word I’ve never used, yet it has always struck me as such a slick word to work into conversation. I’ll have to be more diligent and work it into my vocabulary going forward.
Lest I become complacent.
I’ll be out of debt by the end of this year. I’ll outright own everything that I’ve been calling mine. So given my luck this will happen just after I pay off everything.
And I’ll still celebrate for the same reason I’d celebrate if everyone’s student loans in the US were forgiven even though I paid mine off a while ago. Because it’s the best thing for all of us.
If you own a home, do you really own it? Try not paying your property taxes for a bit.
unfortunately the backups are global. and banks have a lot of backups.
But the 10 guys only have one head each
indeed.
It would seem logical, that the adaption of that concept to modern times, would also require technical terrorism. Not just physical. And a wider spread. An effort most likely not being possible at all…
i prefer rebellion to terrorism. just stop obeying. that is all it takes.
Tyler Durden was on the right track, but Elliot Alderson took it much further. We’d need both to do it right.
We’re gonna need a lot of kerosene then
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I love how the capitalists apologist brain rot gets downvoted like crazy in this comment section
It does in general on Lemmy, given that Lemmy is structured along leftist principles and there’s already a Capitalist, centralized Lemmy called Reddit.
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Eat the rich. They are full of fiber.
In ancient Greece. The concept of beauty was so ingrained in the hearts of people. That no matter how poor you were - no matter how long the seigh of a city lasted. No one stole the gold that was on the statues located around town. Because to the Greek, beauty WAS life.
Doing the math, if you took the wealth of the top 10 people and divided it up among the world’s population, everyone would get 153 dollars.
Seems like a real good reason to get independent and start doing things for passion instead of for money.
Only issue is you can’t eat passion or use it to protect you from the elements. The idea of doing something for passion while tangentially making just enough money to support yourself is and always was a lie under a capitalist system. If we want to do that, we need to change the system first.
You can’t eat money either. You can use passion to create food, though.
Also I’m totally living that lie. Might be a crapshoot to try it, but it’s working for me. It’d probably work for a lot of miserable 9-5ers.
Put a cleaning robot in a public space, and count the number of hours until it’s been vandalized.
Those kinds of people are a major contributor too.
Maybe the robot is getting vandalized because a person used to be paid to do that job.
Exactly, people are resentful just because they are becoming worthless in the increasingly modern society.
So you think teens spray painted the hell out of new York’s subways because they put someone out of work 80 years before that?
I think the teens spray painting subways has more to do with marginalizing an entire class of people and a failure of public services, which were largely gutted at the bequest of a few billionaires who wanted to watch their number go up. Any dollar spent that doesn’t come back to them is a dollar they see as one they’ve lost. And the number must go ever up.
Kid’s vandalism has been studied and that’s mostly wrong: propensity to vandalize is most strongly tied to parent-child relationships.
Sure maybe billionaires taking all the resources makes parents less likely to be there for their kids, but the gap between parents who are there and deadbeats who let the wolves do the babysitting is not someone else’s fault.
Upbringing cannot be thrown away just so you can blame billionaires for why nice things aren’t the norm
When did we get from a cleaning robot getting vandalized to teens spray painting subways?
I’ve got this big bag of random arguments. Whenever I’m cornered on one I pull another one out.
Vandalism in general, and that can be generally further into people ruining nice things, these are examples
