uriel238
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on When the Democrats regain power, their centrist leadership will claim, "We can't do anything because...". Don't be fooled. We need to get the corporate centrists out and real progressives in! 3 hours ago:
We need to organize twelve million Americans under a common manifesto.
If the Democrats don’t take power in 2029 (both houses of the legislature and the executive), if they fail to move quickly, overhauling SCOTUS and ironcladding elections to stop tampering and voter suppression cold, then the US public needs to occupy Washington by multiple millions with a list of demands.
Or general strike.
Or riot in multiple municipal areas hard enough to overwhelm responders.
Or go on a billionaire assassination spree.
If we cannot do that, then we’re all going to be packed onto the cattle cars. Not necessarily all together, but the US will fall to one-party autocracy.
US Dictatorship by 2033 is on the BINGO card.
- Comment on Don't worry about it haha 7 hours ago:
Restrictions to child labor in the US are about factory work. And states are passing exceptions so that teens, especially delinquent teens, can work near dangerous machinery.
But kids have always been allowed to do agricultural work for less than minimum wage.
- Comment on Happy Kirkday! 7 hours ago:
Don’t laugh! As the Islamic Golden Age was pivoting towards religious extremism, algebra was labeled as sorcery and turned into a capital crime.
- Comment on Life 7 hours ago:
I think if I can link people (or provide websearch-ready key words) to good takes and deep dives relevant to the subject, then I’m doing a good thing.
Otherwise, I tend to be a Tad Verbose, which is also my porn name.
- Comment on Happy Kirkiversary 7 hours ago:
He was in that rare space of occasionally making antisemitic statements while also being consistently pro-Israel, so on the presumption Israel is a Jewish nation, the grounds for an assassination attempt by an Israeli radical extremist is remotely plausible.
As a note, Israel is not a nation for Jewish people. It’s a nation for rich people who happen to be Jews. The class divide between wealthy Jews and working class Jews is historically greater than solidarity between them. (As it is with Christians, LGBT+ or most identities.)
There’s a lot of pro-Israel antisemitism cross-sectionality, especially in Protestant Evangelism as it is ministered in the United States.
The white Christian nationalist movement is pro-Israel specifically because they are looking forward to the second advent (the apocalypse in Revelation as a future prediction). One of the prophesied events as the end times approach is the return of the Jewish people to Israel. Hence, their pro-Israel efforts are part of an effort to hurry that process along. (Prophesies never ever worked that way, but whatever. It’s not my parade.)
But also in that same biblical interpretation, the Jewish peoples are damned to Hellfire while Christians (as narrowly defined by the movement) are gathered unto Heaven. So for the white Christian nationalist movement, Israel is a tool to serve its own metaphysical purposes.
- Comment on Fox News sharing billionaire propaganda 1 day ago:
This is why regulation is necessary. The moonshots returned $14 for every $1 spent thanks to science and innovation we benefited from it. Lobbying government returns $120 for every $1 spent.
Financialization returns exponentially more. In fact, most of the billionaires that exist are finance bros that got rich from private equity and market manipulation. Stock buybacks are a recent number-go-up tactic. These things, like rent-seeking, don’t actually produce value but make profit.
So when we say the ultra-wealthy got rich by exploiting, we are totally underestimating the amount of wrongdoing they are committing.
But then Marx notes in Das Kapital that the capitalist will always seek to capture government and regulatory bodies in order to game the system, thereby destabilizing it until it collapses. The process feeds on itself and gets worse at an accellerating rate.
Unless something very radical is done, civilization worldwide is going to fall.
- Comment on Fox News sharing billionaire propaganda 1 day ago:
FOX News is the billionaire propaganda mouthpiece. It’s all it does.
Well, MAGA ideology propaganda, but same thing.
- Comment on Fox News sharing billionaire propaganda 1 day ago:
They shouldn’t but they do, because the billionaires and corporations have bought the government. That is to say they’ve bribed the officials in the government, though for a while now there are no laws or enforcement mechanisms in place to prevent this kind of corruption.
Lobbying the government is very profitable, far more so than any kind of positive innovation that capitalism is allegedly supposed to promote. It’s why governments criminalize this kind of influence from business interests or wealth. Usually companies just pass laws so that smaller rival businesses cannot compete, but they can also pass laws to give companies huge subsidies, no-bid contracts and tax cuts.
Financialization, it turns out, is even more profitable, which is using financial shenanigans like private equity to turn a reputable business into a giant ponzi scheme. The financial bros are long gone when the massive loan burden of the company is due. It leaves huge sinkholes in the economy, including Toys R Us, which is now a bunch of abandoned warehouses and unused giant outlets.
Currently, our ultra-wealthy, most of whom got rich through financialization, are trying to do the same thing with the US, itself, getting elected officials to pass huge budgets giving them no-bid contracts where they can charge grossly inflated prices. In the meantime, all this is incurs a huge amount of national debt.
Since Trump is doing everything in his power to isolate the US from the rest of the world (he wanted to do this since the beginning of his first term), when the bond market collapses, there won’t be anyone in the world willing to help us out, and the US will be reduced, like Toys R Us to husks of storefronts.
And then, our ultrawealthy can buy up US land for a song, and turn it into quarries, oilfields and data centers as far as the eye can see, though they seem completely oblivious about how they’re going to keep the workforce alive to run them.
- Comment on To be happy… 2 days ago:
I think air frying technology isn’t so grand as a stable, functioning society.
Essentially we got fucked once Falwell figured out anti-abortion-access radicals will vote against their own interests. It didn’t hurt that white America really hates blacks.
Anyhow, that helped to get Reagan in to power and the economy turned K-shaped and never recovered, and at that point liberal democracy in the US was doomed.
- Comment on Paid Time Off Hypocrisy 2 days ago:
Trump and his oligarch friends do not give a wit about the working class, in fact resent us. They would rather work us to death like slaves at a sugar cane plantation than treat us with decency even if the latter is more profitable to them.
This is why in the US labor unions have had to claw all of the worker treatment regulations that existed (and are no longer enforced) in the workplace, from the weekend and forty-hour work week to safe working conditions.
Since it’s easier for the owner class to bust unions than it is for workers to form them, civilization might just be screwed until we figure out how to universally teach class consciousness.
- Comment on Paid Time Off Hypocrisy 2 days ago:
Oh no. Massie is scary as fuck when you look at his policies and voting record. He just believed the MAGA flavor aid stuff, such as exposing all the elites in the Epstein files.
As with all of Trump’s prior cronies, Trump commands absolute loyalty but returns none, and so when Trump’s policies change, well, US was at war with Iran; therefore US had always been at war with Iran.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 4 days ago:
Here’s hoping! Getting the unruly mobs out for a visibility rally is a first step. We also need to get everyone to agree on a manifesto by which to make our demands, and that means getting a bunch of legal experts to create a charter.
Definitely beyond my pay grade.
- Comment on I'm not sure they will 1 week ago:
Something similar happened in January 2013. In protest of the SOPA/PIPA bills that threatened section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, Wikipedia went dark.
It got everyone’s attention, especially students, who had grown accustomed to Wikipedia’s ubiquity as a resource.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 1 week ago:
I am not surprised, nor am I impressed.
Don’t bother blocking me. I’ll do it for you.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 1 week ago:
Smaller insular groups get wiped out by infectious diseases, but they don’t communicate them to other insular groups. And that is the going hypothesis of why we really like to organize in small bands about the size of our Facebook friends list, and want to throw rocks at people from other tribes.
Larger intermixing populations gain their immunity by first having a lot of them die off. This is one of the benefits(?) of ranching livestock, since they’re a vector for diseases that commonly get transmitted to their human owners. The epidemics happen, and then the survivors have the antibodies, and even pass them on to their kin.
Nowadays, we have centralized disease control. It may be failing in the US but the rest of the developed world still have a robust system. But human beings haven’t had time to evolve (very much) towards large pluralistic societies that combat disease through science and proactive prevention.
Given enough time, I’d think we might, since large pluralistic societies also develop science, technology and arts much faster in general, often much to the chagrin of moral guardians like religious ministries.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 1 week ago:
You’re engaging in violence fantasy. If you were here and tried to carry it out, you’d be dead and countless innocents piled on top of you.
You’re also totally underestimating the size of the response necessary.
Additionally, far-right Charlie Kirks are sponsored by the oligarchs, while far left ones are labeled as terrorists and hunted down by regime paramilitaries. We’ve seen this both during the German Reich and during the US civil rights movement. Why do you think the entire developed world is determined to strip anonymity from social media access?
We’re not fighting against a unite-the-right rally. We’re fighting the entirety of the federal government, and cooperating state governments.
You’re also asking some of us to sacrifice ourselves, which is a huge ask on its own. But the least we need to do is make sure those sacrifices aren’t in vein.
Something tells me you’ve never been in a society under attack by a captured government. Something tells me that you’d cow in your own dwelling if the circumstances rapidly developed around you. But do feel free to tell specific tales if I’m wrong. I’ll read them.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 1 week ago:
Such as?
To fix this we need to organize twelve million Americans. We could seize Washington by force. Occupying Washington with six million supported by the other six would likely be enough. Or we could stage a general strike and support those workers not earning a living.
But we need to create a larger organized revolt than has ever been done before. And we’ll need a manifesto that everyone can agree on.
It turns out that’s actually quite difficult.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 1 week ago:
Firstly, racism is always a thing. Xenophobia is how humans kept infectious diseases at bay for most of human existence. But then we did the agriculture thing and decided to try out larger societies. Throughout history, though societies have always had to contend with half the population hating the other half enough to get violent.
The whole point of post-enlightenment civilizations is to treat everyone equally. But the US’ economy depended on slavery, and we weren’t ready to give rights to women, and those left cracks fit for social wedges.
Secondly, racism is a tool and always has been. The owner class has always resented the working class, and now they can live so far removed from us that they don’t even pretend or develop empathy by sharing the street with us. Heck Thiel wants to make his own Rapture in which everything is automated.
Racism is the hook by which the massive, oligarch-owned, far-right, propaganda machine draws in its viewership before feeding them the MAGA ideology and encouraging them to isolate themselves from all other information sources (and the libs). It turns out in the last century we’ve developed a lot of psychology. It’s just not used as much to heal minds.
But the owner class hates us all. It may hate non-white non-Christians slightly more, but the thing that disgusts them the most about us, by far, is that we are poor. And they’re just as eager to deny us a means to survive as working-class white men would to black men.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 1 week ago:
Oh it’s worse than that. Once America’s billionaires plunder the US treasury and tank the bond market (so we can’t borrow any more), they’ll make good their escape and then do the same to the rest of the developed world.
They’re richer than any royalty or industrialist robber baron has in history by at least a factor of four, and can afford to buy all the elections and capture all of the governments.
Quarries and data centers as far as the eye can see.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 1 week ago:
We only need to organize twelve million Americans to counter this.
Sadly, we’ll need to organize twelve million Americans to counter this.
- Comment on Walmart actually teaches their employees how to get food stamps 1 week ago:
Although, the billionaires and trillionaires are a symptom of the endgame. By far, most of our billionaires attained their wealth though financialization, that is to say financial shenanigans that do not produce value and wreak havoc on the economy.
An example is private equity, which is what happened to Toys 'R Us, Radio Shack, Claires, and countless other brands.
Normally, once the feds detect financial shenanigans, we outlaw them under fraud. But the owner class reacts by capturing regulatory agencies and/or defunding them so they can’t enforce their regulations. Citizens United was the death knell for the US.
It’s going to take ending the owner class to get out of this mess, and if wait too long, the ultra wealthy are rich enough to do the same thing to the rest of the developed world.
And we have to do it before we run out of water.
- Comment on Walmart actually teaches their employees how to get food stamps 1 week ago:
Pro tip: They never did.
(on YouTube)
- Comment on A reminder 1 week ago:
The problem with being at the bottom of the second estate is that the ones at the top are entirely cutthroat and exclusionist. As Corey Doctorow notes, the owner class thinks there’s just too many people, hence the AI fantasy of automating all the peasant and middle-class work. (Both the first and third estates.) But they also think the owner class itself is too populous.
It may be a while before the goon squads get down the purge list to come for the Thromby level plutocrats, but they are on the list.
The ultra-wealthy are also greedy AF. There’s a story about when Carnegie figured out that J.P. Morgan would totally knife him if it meant getting his assets. He stopped associating with Morgan soon after. People like Thiel, Bezos and Musk have revealed themselves to the public to show they are exactly that level of ruthless.
- Comment on A reminder 1 week ago:
Larry Lessig made this point, that the people who get representation are the ones who donate the maximum allowable direct donation to their campaign. (Even that is peanuts compared to super-PAC money and dark money, but it’s worthy of an annual Christmas card, and even a fruit basket.)
The difference is that you still need half a brain. This is the 1970s George Lucas level, where he still has to listen to experts or (in the case of ESB hire experts to direct his movie for him). In fact, a note to boards of directors everywhere, this is where you want your C-Suite to be and stay, so that they use data-driven science to determine their management policies, which will maximize profits. Contrast our vindictive tech billionaires whose hiring and firing practice is brain-draining their own companies, and wrecking the entry-level job market which is where they would glean their future expertise. (Sorry. This is a specific rant of mine.)
Once you get sufficiently rich (a billion will more than qualify) then you make money whether or not you do anything, and, as Zuckerberg and George W. Bush have demonstrated, you can do an awful lot of stupid and still fail upwards.
- Comment on The good old days 1 week ago:
I recently used this as an example of how mass surveillance escalates suspicion. If you drive home from work the same way for months and then change your route, that can be grounds for suspicion and investigation. Nevermind, you just charted a better path home.
And as law enforcement works in the US, post PATRIOT act, if you can be investigated under general suspicion, rather than for a specific crime. And you will be charged for any crimes discovered. And if you are in sight of the police (e.g. in an ALPR database) then every possible set of behaviors and conditions are suspicious.
- Comment on An American city has been without power for 2 weeks, unacceptable. 1 week ago:
I’m pretty sure the US had its hooks into the rest of the Americas. It engaged in a lot of interventionism in the name of containment during the twentieth century. The stereotype of the banana republic comes from US political capture of tropical states in the name of large corporate fruit growers.
- Comment on US corporate profits surge to record as worker payouts wilt 1 week ago:
Sadly, it’s not easy to organize twelve million Americans.
- Comment on A reminder 1 week ago:
Because of that whole exponential thing, millionaires and ten-millionaires are actually closer to the rest of us working class folk than they are their billionaire owner-class brethren.
And this is going to be important when the ultra-wealthy decide to reveal their less-rich near-peers aren’t actually in the oligarchs club, and don’t get to live in Thiel’s Rapture-style hypercities with the real people.
- Comment on A reminder 1 week ago:
A good concept to pass around is contrived desperation or manufactured desperation. The notion that desperation circumstances like the affordability crisis are intentionally developed by the ownership class so that workers will accept low wages, poor benefits, harsh conditions and abuse by their management and colleagues.
An extreme fictional example is in the TV series Squid Game. The players quit in the opening episode after they learn that the stakes of the game are their own lives, and only one out player would survive. But then (in the second ep) they return to their prior lives in which their financial situation is so dire, it compels them to return to the game.
The Epstein child sex ring is a strong non-fictional example of contrived desperation. The girls under Epstein’s employ quickly learned they were being groomed to be sexually exploited. But they were drawn from communities that offered few opportunities.¹ Girls quickly learned that they could escape their dire circumstances at home so long as they agreed to play ball, and be complicit in their own sexual exploitation.
We’re seeing another example in the US armed forces. All branches are achieving their recruitment quotas. Despite the news of the dire circumstances of the Abraham Lincoln. Despite that the military is deployed in an active theater. Despite that rates of abuse of enlisteds, especially of women, has only escalated since Hegseth’s tenure as SoD and his warrior ethos. Despite that the US is considering putting boots on the ground in Iran and Cuba.
When the ownership class is sufficiently removed from the working class, it loses touch, and stops empathizing, and then starts contriving desperation to get workers to stay in their place. Unions can be an effective countermeasure, though they are often busted by the political class and the police.
And that’s because a growing number of people are finding they have no other opportunities to stay above water. People are going into credit-card debt and skipping meals, and working 40+ hours a week. They are three very bad months away from being homeless already, and their numbers are growing.
¹ Epstein’s early victims were girls from post-Soviet Russia. During the collapse, the most popular career for young women was wage prostitute and children in the streets offering sexual favors for money were commonplace. It was an entire failing nation of desperate teenage girls.
- Comment on US corporate profits surge to record as worker payouts wilt 1 week ago:
At what point do we, as the proletariat, swear vengeance on the ownership class, who actively conspired across decades to starve us out and enslave us?