- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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It works for the top and that’s all we count evidently
A healthy, broadly educated population, which feels safe and secure, is incompatible with, and toxic to, conservative and authoritarian ideologies.
They need you to be sick, stupid, and scared.
the system works exactly as it’s supposed to, which is why it must be destroyed.
STOP. ELECTING. CAPITALISTS.
“Stop voting for those you have no choice but to vote for”
Hey! There is usually an honest Christian nationalist further down the ticket you can give your vote.
/s is mandatory
Sadly it is only the tone and not the facts that are sarcastic.
I agree. But also, they’re all capitalists. Even the so-called Democratic socialists are capitalists.
Yes, and capitalism can work if it’s well regulated. And that means the people have to control the government, not the corporations or billionaires. Thats what’s very wrong in the USA now.
The entire fundamental goal of capitalism is to commodify any potential source of profit. That means something like a “well regulated government” which is a guaranteed negative profit engine will always be amongst the first things to be commodified.
The only way that “works” is if the government treats corporations and billionaires with a equal or greater level of contempt than they treat the government. At which point it is, by any reasonable definition, no longer capitalism.
Well, the idea is to use people’s greed to drive growth and progress. If the government can shape profit forces to drive life quality improvements of the population, then it can work. This basically boils down to taxing bad shit, or making certain practices illegal. People will always try to game the system and find holes, and the government needs to constantly watch for this and plug the. Then competition within those rules can lead to positive outcomes.
The government doesn’t need to treat corporations or billionaires with contempt, it just needs to ignore their wants and prioritize on the people.I understand the idea, I’m saying the idea is inherently contradictory and stupid.
The government doesn’t need to treat corporations or billionaires with contempt, it just needs to ignore their wants
A corporation only exists as a legal fiction. A corporation can not exist if a state “ignores their wants” because the state is the one granting the desire for the corporation to exist in the first place! Billionaires function similarly via the concept of private property but that one is a bit more roundabout.
They exist because the state intrinsically cares deeply because “billionaires” have every incentive to ensure the state does so. The state “ignoring their wants” does not come close to matching the incentives of the “billionaires” and as such the Nash equilibrium will ALWAYS favor the “billionaires” without equal, or greater, incentives for the state.
You set up a system based inherently on ‘winner takes all’ style conflict and are surprised when the most ruthless and least moral people end up winning?
Any system will break down when the most ruthless and least moral people take control. You could argue that a communist system is no longer a communist system when the ruthless take over, buts that’s just the same as saying a well regulated capitalist system gets fucked up when the ruthless take over. I know capitalism is based on competition and that maybe makes it particularly fragile in that respect, but the competition part also makes it efficient and with the right regulations i think it can be efficient in terms of things that are good for humanity.
The entire philosophy behind capitalism is to reward those that are the most ruthlessly greedy.
That is not true of communism, socialism, anarchism, syndicalism, etc.
To use a sports metaphor; sure a ‘win at any cost’ approach results in fiercer competition and yes a little bit of sportsmanship would make it so less people die. But sportsmanship is diametrically opposed to a win at any cost mentality.
capitalism
can workis somewhat more the tolerable if it’s well regulatedFTFY.
I think we’re well past the idea that capitalism is the “end of history”. The profit motive is always gonna lead us back here.
I think if donations to political parties were limited to a couple of hundred dollars per person and no corps or other funding allowed - or better yet, paid for only by a public fund based on the number of votes last cycle, then the system would have a chance. We’d need much more anti-corruption systems for politicians too. And this stuff would have to be constitutionally protected. The goal would be to make it so the politicians can only game for votes from the people. And Corp/capital owners could only game the system writhin the rules set by the government which is actually beholden to the people. People could innovate and take reasonable risks/work hard and be rewarded for that. Of course decent education is part of the equation too.
If you keep capitalism no amount of political donation/lobbying regulation will ever fix the problem. The problem being that having money affords you influence, even without donating directly to political parties, or by lobbying and legally bribing politicians with cushy jobs after they leave politics.
The goal would be to make it so the politicians can only game for votes from the people.
If we allow wealth to be amassed and concentrated in the hands of a few (who extracted that excess value from the workers who actually produced it), we hand control of the economy, and thus society to an unelected oligarchy.
If you control the wealth of a nation, including capital, you control the workers who are economically forced to work for you, as they lack enough money to compete with you.
When you control the capital, you decide what projects are invested in, you can influence elected bodies to bend over backwards for you with tax reductions (see, Amazon and basically getting cities to bid for them to locate parts of their business there).
And oh so much more that I am too inarticulate to make concise here.
You can’t regulate your way to capitalism working, since the profit motive will always work to undo them (see the fact that Anti-Trust is barely being enforced anymore in the US, and the rest of the world generally)
Yeah this is way beyond voting. Even in the context of just voting, it’s often necessary to vote for a lesser evil. Case in point, all the “Kamala didn’t earn my vote!” dipshits who handed Trump the presidency on a silver platter.
You gotta make strategic choices with voting, and sometimes that kinda sucks.
So do that. But also break out the guillotines when the people you voted for start behaving maliciously. That’s what we’re failing, and that’s why things have gone so far shit.
Case in point, all the “Kamala didn’t earn my vote!” dipshits who handed Trump the presidency on a silver platter.
That line has been dead for over a year, you need to find a new scapegoat.
Not sure what argument you think you’re making. If we had a 100% turnout and still had enough people waste their vote on some protest candidate or even directly for Trump as some kind of accelerationist nonsense, the situation would still be what I’m griping about, which is people failing to vote strategically (and failing to behead malevolent people in positions of power). Nonvoters are only part of the issue.
…and not that it matters, but I don’t buy that article’s pitch for a second. High voter turnout trends blue. A study can hypothesize to the contrary, but a single study doesn’t prove shit (in any context - peer review ftw).
The system works, and it’s doing exactly what it’s designed to do.
That’s why it needs to be dismantled and replaced with something new.
I feel like I was lied to all through school. Work hard, get good grades, and everything will work out.
Nope, unaffordable rent, suckass job market. I feel like I’m being exploited every day I’m at work, even when I like the job and the people.
deleted by creator
The system does work. Perfectly. For those who installed it. Which are the top 5%.
I’m not going to sit here and pretend that this isn’t part of what radicalized me back in the early 2000s.
However, as my world expanded through my life experiences and reading I came to understand that so much of what seems like a natural reward is artificiality propped at the expense of people in other parts of the world. That’s the system. Western workers have access to a wide range of material goods with prices kept artificially low because they are produced by workers who are paid less. What manufacturing that exists is much cleaner than it used to be, because the dangerous stuff is off shore, far from our eyes. Hell, we don’t even have to deal with the huge mountains of waste we produce! Temporary Migrant workers in agriculture and domestic work fill the same role except it is their labour that is exported cheaply.
I know the meme is about housing and the ‘cheaply made goods’ apply to that too. I live in a house built in the 1960s that is kind of the icon of cheap and cheerful working class post war period sprawl boom. Block foundation a wood frame with vinyl siding. Cheap to build, but can get expensive to maintain.
I guess all I mean to say is that I hope people who are seeing this problem are not easily swayed back into complacency if the capitalists recalibrate the feed of crumbs they give to the workers to ensure compliance. I hope for an era of world wide worker solidarity as it is the only way to tackle the problems capitalism has left us with.
I’m not going to try and convince people to have the exact same beliefs and analysis as I have because that’s silly and futile. I think most people would not find this documentary to be too radical: https://www.storyofstuff.org/
Maybe give it a watch if you have the time and the comparison to depression era housing practices sounded reasonable lol. It’s so easy to take for granted how much things have changed in the last 150 or so years in north america, especially post WW2.
(You can save yourself the well acksualy about Henry Ford and his approach to wages in the 1910s. They are an important piece of the puzzle but reducing the cost of consumer goods allowed western wages to stay low by retain buying power so the appearance was of increasing standard of living that was increasing dependant on the ability to exploit global workers.)
Maybe you did everything you were supposed to. I didn’t.
And maybe if there was a fair system you could have picked up from a fuck up and be ok. It’s the system that’s a problem not you.
Even outside of the system I didn’t. I’m just alienated from anything and everything.
There is no “system” causing high housing prices. In fact, high housing prices are due to the lack of a system: It’s bunch of homeowners each acting in their personal interest by impeding housing construction in order to increase the values of their own properties. That’s why California introduced a system. Now all cities must build housing proportionally, or else their local zoning restrictions are nullified and builders can build whatever they want. It’s working.
The system is unregulated capitalism. Glad California is regulating.
Construction was and is very regulated in California. Part of what California has been doing is to reduce those regulations to encourage home construction. For example, construction no longer needs to go through an environmental review process if it’s being built on land that already has structures on it. There is a balance when it comes to regulation.
Obviously there’s a balance.
I think the expectations were set too high because they grew up able to see the best parts of everyone else’s life at their fingertips 24/7. Maybe it’s time to look towards starting adulthood exactly like the boomers did. They ended up where they are without the internet or TikTok just fine.
Consider moving to the middle of nowhere and providing a service to the local community. Live within your means. Reconsider what you’ve been taught to expect in life. Adulthood shouldn’t be defined by what you own, like a home, car, etc… It should be using your new liberties to take risk and earn what you want. Otherwise, you’re just submitting yourself to be someone else’s means to risk their earning potential.
You can’t just move regional and get a job. You still need means, an audience, a support network and just as importantly users for the service that pays the bills.
Years ago you could start a shop or a service. Lots of these options have been wiped out.
Not with that attitude.
What do you mean supposed to do? Doom scroll through school? Cheat through college? This is the dumbest, most useless generation of recent grads I’ve ever seen. It’s not just me, its a studied, measurable drop in math skills, reading skills and attention. They’re fucking worthless.
They’re fucking worthless.
Projection.
Maybe instead of blaming them… you look at the years and years of dismantling funding for schools and the push for technology in the classroom…
Oh yeah, that’s fucked. Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely not saying it’s their fault that they’re worthless, just that they are worthless.
The mix of experimenting with tech in the classroom, social media, then add in missing two developmental years from covid, and we have ourselves a lost generation.
We already learned our lessons. California has banned phones in schools starting this school year. Many countries are banning kids under 18 or 16 from social media all together.
We learned a ton from how badly gen z turned out. But they did turn out very badly.
