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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 19th, 2023

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  • It is not merely wealth distribution, but the fact that in capitalism that wealth immediately translates to power over society and people’s time in a more direct way than all previous systems. And sure, I am considering new systems, that is why I took exception to your framing of it not being “left vs. right”. Nearly, by definition, Right wing is preserving a current society or regressing back to a previous system, Left wing is, by definition, about change and new systems. Left wing isn’t necessarily being urban or having dyed hair or whatever conservatives try to obfuscate with. Being anti-elite is nearly always left wing and being pro-elite is nearly always right wing, right wingers try to obfuscate and channel that resentment with lies and bullshit. Like claiming a barista is an “elite” by having a bachelors degree and pronouns, despite making minimum wage, while a millionaire business owner is “working class” because he wears blue jeans and listens to country music in his pickup truck.












  • Almost as if every person is capable of shitting their pants, and I will baselessly assume, does so regularly like me. As always, there are differences in degrees and causes. Outside of capitalism, famine actually correlates to not having food to feed people, rather than markets saying that food has to be wasted while people starve because it is not profitable to feed them (e.g. the Dust Bowl and Great Depression for American examples). Also ignoring how it was intentional in colonial powers.




  • It is not that there isn’t some flow both ways, but that the material conditions is much more dominant than people coming up with ideas and mechanations moving things in ways contradicting the conditions. The system setting the conditions is in fact dominant. The way corruption and self-dealing manifests is different between where you can just create a private corporation and lobby for a government contract to justify being given a 500 million dollars of tax payer money, versus trying to massage Gosplan to syphon off several million Rubles of excess spending, versus tricking a sovereign wealth fund to hand over several billion dollars for some supposed innovative building company to create innovations for Neom.


  • The fact that it is attributed to a very few actors and not a literal, singular actor does not negate great man theory.

    The issue is that this is arbitrarily flattening of the actual material conditions. You can point out that nearly all political systems, on a long enough timeline lead to some form of collapse (Joseph Tainter is a good reference on this). But all of these things are dependent, not independent, of the systems and conditions they find themselves in. The timescales and forms can vary drastically depending on the material conditions actors find themselves in.