3mo ago

hey capitalism, how are you doing?

yeah..

You're viewing a single thread.

65 comments

I'm so fucking sick of hearing about egg prices. It's the least important thing happening in this dumpster fire of a country right now. I still eat eggs everyday by the way. It costs like $2 more each week. Oh no.
- It's important because it's the central promise of our system. Capitalism/Liberal Democracy/Whatever, it doesn't promise equality, or world peace, or spiritual enlightenment: It promises that you can buy cheap consumer crap, and now it can't even deliver that.
  
  Exactly. Capitalism is only tolerable as long as the material conditions of the working class improve decade after decade. The average worker has been in steady decline for 50 years, but over the last 25 years nearly the entire working class has been suffering.
  
  If the growth goes away, people have to wonder what they are getting in exchange, in any system, not just capitalism. For example, this is the same expectation people have from the Communist Party in China. Most people will agree that givint up their freedoms was worth the huge improvement in quality of life.
- But hey! We aren't talking about innocents now being slaughtered by our operations halfway across the world (again)... almost like a recurring theme...
  
  The media is just playing to the electorate there, I'm afraid.
  I watched the YouTube stream of a recent Maryland townhall: dark blue state, all Democrat Representatives and Senators speaking and taking questions, hosted by a Democrat county executive. Someone got up and confronted them about the immigrants abducted by ICE being held in Baltimore Harbor and not allowed to see their lawyers. Multiple people in the live chat started complaining that they weren't discussing real issues like Social Security and Medicare. ... Even though they had discussed it earlier. Americans are fundamentally selfish.
  
  I would wager that some American demographics are a lot more selfish than others... I digress, because it doesn't change two facts:
  Media has long manufactured consent (even lying in doing so 🤯, see: Iraq) for various attrocities committed by the united states government, regardless of popular support.
  And second, the gutting of social security by bypassing budget approvals (infraction of sep. of powers) and kidnapping of students based on ideology and without due process (just authortarianism) are part of the same issue currently afflicting the US. If for some reason individuals drive a cudgel between these issues, they're more than either ignorant to or complicit with the issue they whatabout over.
  But on that, given your anecdote is taken from a livestream chat, you may be underestimating just how much astroturfing takes place. We've known part of the playbook is to completely overwhelm our media intake, desaturating perceived potency of headlines and happenings. I would go as far to take wedging issues like that to be another tactic... as we've seen that strategy successfully work to drive flimsy democrats to 180 on LGBT rights.
  If you assume the worst of the people you will need to work with, you won't get to influence them enough to understand the nature of the issue at hand
  
  Yeah, why don't we just let the electoral college choose our next president again next time? I'm sure they'll pick the best kin...president possible. I love how democracy works! We suffer so a hand full of people can make the right decision. Sometimes the hard decision. Like say we were brown and the decision was to fall or not to fall into an abyss. The electoral college would quickly see the situation and rescue us. Thanks to the electoral college the potholes get quickly filled and my kid's school is not closing soon.

65 comments