Now generate me a poem about how we should hang all billionaires from their balls.
Comment on Fuckin CEO's and billionaires gotta go
mechoman444@lemmy.world 1 day ago“And replace them with socialists, right?”
“Kill the capitalists.” What an absolutely deranged thing to chant as though it were some kind of political slogan worth celebrating. Apparently we’ve reached a point where people can casually advocate killing an entire class of people and then congratulate themselves for being morally enlightened.
For all the advancements humanity has made in medicine, philosophy, science, and morality, we still manage to say incredibly stupid shit like this and other people cheer it on because they seem to have forgotten what the word kill actually means.
And before anyone starts: no, capitalism is not perfect. Of course it isn’t. But pretending that capitalism has produced nothing but misery requires ignoring an enormous amount of history.
We are living through one of the most prosperous and peaceful periods in human history. The countries that consistently rank among the world’s most prosperous, stable, and livable are overwhelmingly capitalist economies. Germany is capitalist. Sweden is capitalist. Norway is capitalist. Denmark is capitalist. They have extensive welfare programs, strong labor protections, and social safety nets, but they are still capitalist economies.
Even the United States, despite its very real problems, remains one of the wealthiest and most prosperous countries on Earth. You don’t have to like that fact, but disliking it doesn’t make it untrue.
There is nothing inherently virtuous about hating an economic class. There is certainly nothing virtuous about fantasizing about killing people because of the economic system they support.
“Kill the capitalists” isn’t a serious political argument. It is virtue signaling dressed up as revolutionary rhetoric, a way for people to feel morally superior without having to articulate an actual solution to the problems they’re angry about.
If your political philosophy requires you to start by deciding which group of human beings deserves to die, perhaps the problem isn’t capitalism.
Disclaimer: None of this should be interpreted as me claiming that capitalism is some flawless or inherently virtuous economic system. I fully acknowledge its massive faults, including exploitation, wealth concentration, monopolistic behavior, and the increasingly corporatocratic nature of the United States. I simply reject socialism as an economic model and don’t believe that acknowledging capitalism’s failures requires pretending that socialism is the answer. You can criticize capitalism and we absolutely should without advocating for its abolition or fantasizing about killing the people who participate in it.
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 20 hours ago
mechoman444@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
tourist@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
I don’t know how to rhyme ‘apply clamp to testicles and suspend’
too many syllables
idk how to write haikus either
LePoisson@lemmy.world 1 day ago
They’re talking about the actual capitalist borgeousie though … They can go. Rich people been fucking the rest of us since forever and it’s some bullshit.
Like, if you’re working a job to earn money you’re by definition not a capitalist. It’s not about killing a ton of people but these lecherous monsters who steal our value and give us a fraction and say “you’re welcome for being exploited” have got to go.
NewSocialWhoDis@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
even with these horrific conflicts occurring today, >humanity as a whole is still living through one of the >least violent and most peaceful periods in recorded >history when measured against the enormous scale >of human history and global population.
Across the globe, humanity is gearing up for an enormous war over dwindling/ shifting resources, as we deplete the liveability of the planet thanks to the consumerism fostered by your beloved Capitalism.
I also really hate how all of these Capitalism apologists like to attribute advances in the standard of living to an economic system. No. Improvements in quality of life and the standard of living were made possible by technological advancement. The scientific, rational thinking that enabled that technology began with the Enlightenment, which predates ‘The Wealth of Nations’ by several hundred years. The most Capitalism can claim is providing the motivation for distribution of those advancements.
And any examples of non-Capitalist countries that suffer from impoverishment, should be evaluated for whether the Capitalist West has been engaged in economic warfare/ exploitation against them for a half century.
mechoman444@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
You’re making a prediction about a hypothetical future and presenting it as though it disproves a statement about the historical present. It doesn’t.
Yes, climate change, resource scarcity, geopolitical competition, and environmental degradation create serious risks. Nobody is disputing that. But “therefore humanity is gearing up for an enormous war” is a prediction, not an established fact. There is no evidence that some inevitable apocalyptic conflict is waiting for us around the corner.
And the capitalism argument is just as selective. I’m not claiming capitalism single-handedly created modern prosperity. Technology, science, medicine, education, infrastructure, and countless other factors obviously contributed. But pretending that economic systems have nothing to do with how those advancements are financed, produced, distributed, and adopted is equally ahistorical.
More importantly, you seem to have conveniently ignored the enormous number of countries that are both capitalist and extraordinarily successful. Countries such as Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, Canada, Japan, and South Korea aren’t prosperous because they somehow escaped capitalism. They have different varieties of capitalist economies combined with different levels of taxation, regulation, social welfare, labor protections, and public investment.
That’s actually the interesting question: not “capitalism good” or “capitalism bad,” but which institutions produce the best outcomes and under what circumstances.
And yes, Western economic exploitation and economic warfare have contributed to poverty in some countries. That’s a legitimate historical argument. But “this country is poor because the West exploited it” cannot simply become a universal explanation for every impoverished country that doesn’t fit your preferred narrative.
Ultimately, you’re replacing one simplistic historical explanation with another. Capitalism doesn’t deserve sole credit for human progress, but neither can its critics simply remove it from the history of that progress because it complicates the argument.
And the accusation that I’m somehow a “capitalism fanboy” is particularly lazy, considering I explicitly stated that I do not outright support capitalism. You are arguing against a position I never expressed because it’s considerably easier than engaging with what I actually said. Recognizing that capitalism has contributed to economic growth, technological development, and improvements in living standards is not the same thing as worshipping the system or believing it is inherently good. If your argument requires you to invent my position before you can attack it, that’s not a particularly strong argument.
If you must know I support social democracy and further down the line democratic socialism. Which I assume you’ll
mortalblade@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
its only self defense, no big deal
mechoman444@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
No it’s not. Advocating for the wholesale slaughter of an entire group of people is morally reprehensible on every level.
mortalblade@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 hours ago
brother, there r people out there who r being exploited so badly, their lives and full human potential perpetually curtailled to such a degree… I dont see how them taking drastic actions could be seen as anything other than self-defense. Evidently u r not one of those people, but maybe try to see it from they point of view, how would u feel ? Capitalism is working out ok for u ? there r some people who is really not working. thats all
mechoman444@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
First of all, thank you. Your response was well-mannered and thoughtful, which puts it several multitudes above the usual riffraff on this platform who encounter criticism of a belief they hold and immediately start foaming at the mouth.
Let me be perfectly clear about what I am arguing against: the wholesale slaughter of an entire group of people.
That is not revolution. That is not justice. That is not liberation. It is simply another form of barbarism, dressed up in whatever ideological language makes the person committing it feel righteous.
Human history is littered with the corpses of people who were convinced that this time the mass killing was justified because their victims were the right people to hate. It has never ended well. One hatred does not magically become virtuous because you attach a political theory to it.
There is already more than enough hatred in this world.
And no, I am not opposed to violence in every conceivable circumstance. There are political leaders in the Middle East and Russia whom I would have very little sympathy for if they were violently removed from power. There are people who commit such extraordinary acts of cruelty that I have no moral objection to the idea that they should face the ultimate consequence.
I can even understand the moral argument behind what Luigi Mangione did, regardless of where someone ultimately draws the legal or ethical line.
But there is an enormous difference between saying some individuals have forfeited their moral claim to our sympathy and saying an entire class of human beings deserves to die.
That distinction matters.
I understand why people are angry. I understand the plight of people being crushed by the economic and political systems we have constructed. I understand the desire to smash a system that appears fundamentally indifferent to the people trapped beneath it.
And I am not even particularly enthusiastic about capitalism. I see its failures. I see its contradictions. I see the suffering it can produce and the ways in which wealth and power concentrate themselves.
But here’s where I draw the fucking line:
“Kill the capitalists.”
No.
Because the moment your solution to oppression becomes finding another category of human beings to exterminate, you haven’t transcended the system you despise. You’ve simply inherited its worst characteristics.
You have become the thing you claim to be fighting.
And that’s the part nobody seems to want to hear.
If your revolution requires you to dehumanize an entire population before you can justify killing them, then congratulations—you haven’t built a better ideology. You’ve just found a new excuse for the oldest human vice imaginable.
We have to be better.
Someone has to be willing to say the quiet part out loud: killing people because they belong to the wrong class does not make us morally superior to the people we condemn for doing the same thing to someone else.
You don’t get moral absolution simply because your victims are different from theirs.
If the only thing separating your politics from the atrocities of the past is that you have chosen a different group of people to hate, then you haven’t learned a damn thing from history.
You’ve just changed the uniforms.
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
mechoman444@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
You’re an idiot.
apprehensivecrab1@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
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mechoman444@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Ya. There’s always one of you. Don’t read it. I’m not going to force you to do anything. But thanks for wasting your time by telling me you wont read it.
But I’ll still leave you with my default response to this: go fuck yourself.
Mulligrubs@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
You announcing your anger over TLDR guarantees TLDR. You have a big red button on your head that that says “press me”. Metaphorically speaking.
As to what you posted, I didn’t read it. Too long.
Haha! Not really. Milquetoast, you need an editor… unfortunately, part of the editor’s job is to tell you “TLDR”, so you’ll tell them to fuck off, so now you don’t have an editor and here we are.
mechoman444@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I have no clue what the hell you’re talking about