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.
"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
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.
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.
Exactly it’s not our fault for fighting against bigoted poor people, it’s bigots fault for being swayed to fight poor people and not join us against the rich
Yes, I fully agree. Some people act like we need to tolerate bigotry for the sake of unity, which is absurd. That's why I often lead by saying I am not a class reductionist.
Seriously, why does Lenny not have the ability to disable notifications on posts?
I guess to encourage engagement, but it honestly has the opposite effect for me since it makes me squint at my inbox while hitting read all so I don't have to see the debatelords and their hot takes lol
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.
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!
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!!!
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.
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.
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.
There are definitely two classes of batteries now.
The batteries sold to oems to go in a product last forever just like they did 20 years ago when they came with "no leak warranties". Because Roku doesn't want leaking batteries in their box that sat unsold on a store shelf for a year before the consumer bought it.
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.
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.
TIL Nokia still makes phones
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.
Instant Pot. Great company, reliable products, going out of business because they didn't fuck consumers. You can't beat capitalism by playing the game. You have to break the game.
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.
Yeah but that has nothing to do with wanting rational discussion and everything to donwith wanting to keep the circlejerk going. Completely fine, just be honest about it.
bran rot
but laws
oh they bought those
oh
Eat the rich. They are full of fiber.
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.
Tyler Durden had the right idea. Project Mayhem is what we need.
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.
unfortunately the backups are global. and banks have a lot of backups.
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
1 billing USD (in one-dollar-bills) weighs 2,204,622 pounds. How much fiber does that add up to???
About 2,204,622 lbs of fiber.
I like Gigagram
1 Gg of fiber
How much ground money can you add to bread before people notice
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.
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.
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.
Oh, well then that justifies their massive wealth hoarding. Thanks for letting us know.
Hey, that is a month's salary for most of the people employed by the people on that list.
So potentially life-changing amounts of wealth for the vast majority of humanity that doesn't live in a first world country, and a nice bump for those who do. Sounds like a good thing then.
Yeah, for most of us on this website, that amount isn't life changing, but for a vast part of people on this planet, it would be highly significant.
For me, I read that comment as being sort of a counter-argument, but in my view, it only goes to show how faulty things are.
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.
The top 10 billionaires vandalize robots in public spaces? What? That makes no sense.
