No no no… It’s not democracy, it’s abstraction

Democracy would be a worker owned business. Where the people who do the thing decide how it should be done. And it’s great, it makes sense, it’s ethical, and the decisions are made democratically by the most informed people

Stock markets don’t work like that. At one point you had voting, but now it’s all speculation and layers of abstraction

Do you think the shareholders know or care how the business is being run? No, they just want line go up, because they’ve got a dozen other places to shift the money to if it’s not going up fast enough

They don’t know or care if the company is dumping chemicals into the lake until the rest of us do. They don’t know that the cars are dangerous, but it was cheaper to set aside money for damages.

They aren’t part of the company at all - they have no responsibility for what the company does. They have no control… Except, collectively. Maybe they could join together to replace a board member or sell to lower the price negligably. And the board has a responsibility to the shareholders. And the CEO just listens to the same consultant the shareholders do

So really, it’s no one’s fault.

Chick fila donates to hate groups, but they also front the money for new franchise owners. Costco pays well. Arizona iced tea doesn’t raise their prices because they have no debt and the guy says he’s making enough money.

Yes, you’re going to have shit heads and good people… But as bad as my pillow guy is I’d be shocked if he was knowingly poisoning people… That usually weighs on a person’s conscience, but not so much if they can diffuse the responsibility

It made me a leftist lol.

The old testament is all about a people who keep fucking up by adopting the shitty practices of the people around them, then being shamed into being better for a while. And then the person who called them out dies or leaves… But if they stay they get too comfortable with power and abuse it. Some of them are assholes the whole way through… It’s about history and notable figures, it’s not aspirational at all

Then the gospels are a how to guide to living under an occupying state.

No temples, we just share meals now. No relics, water is holy now. No leaders, we all serve each other. No money, no stock piles, no rich people - let the tax man have nothing to take. No open resistance to invite a crackdown, instead we’re going to just be really, really obnoxious to deal with through third path shit

It worked so well Rome straight up massacred the communes to stop the spread, and it was still spreading underground until Constantine slapped Jesus branding on the Roman religion.

Finally, I’m not sure what Revelations is about, but it has cool imagery

The Bible really hits different when you don’t have someone explaining each passage one by one going “oh, that wasn’t mutual aid, that was magic”

I tore into someone about how I don’t respect economics (specifically, micro and macro that they push like a religion) because it’s constantly disproven.

And for how they treat you like a child and tell you “you just don’t understand economics” whenever you point out a contradiction, which they obviously then proceeded to do several times instead of answering any of my points

So after that, they apparently went through my old posts to try to poke holes in my other arguments - it wasn’t until the third or fourth one when I realized it was the same username, which I found deeply funny

I mean… You could probably disperse any amount, but a lot of people are going to die from crowd crush

That tends to upset people. One or two picked off by the cops and beaten to death? They were just having fun, they can spin that as an outlier and victim blame

Hundreds trampled to death because you made a full block of people try to run screaming all at once? It’s a lot harder to spin or hide that

She married into it, that’s how she inherited it. I’m not even making a moral stance on exploitation - I’m saying that to be a billionaire, to continue to exist as one, you become an avatar for your hoard

Every sane billionaire is living like a normal person. They’re working the job they love, living in a nice but practical house, and no one (sometimes not even their spouse or children) knows their bank account is endless

I’m not dying on a hill for her or against her. She’s free to do all the good things she likes. I hope she does. I’m not going to interrupt someone doing something I agree with

But she’s still a fucking dragon. Make no mistake. Let her do all the good things in the world, but if the winds change and her hoard is threatened she’ll turn on you. Never forget that

Yes. Unambigiously.

What would you rather have, one person with a ton of power making decisions, or abstract it out over a group and diffuse all responsibility?

Both are bad, but one of them has a (likely not morally great) person at the top, the other has lots of robber barons sharing ownership and collectively demanding line go up

A person isn’t usually dumb enough to fire half their workforce, because they know their bread and butter comes from that workforce. A consulting company advising the business and shareholders at the same time can easily do such stupidity for short term profits

I mean, some of them knew it was coming and lost their phones, but I don’t find it too surprising. Are you really going to risk serious consequences because you got activated when you shouldn’t have been?

Report for duty and let your chain of command fight it out. It’s not up to the guard members to work out the legality of their deployment

Now, if they start telling you to perform violence on civilians, that’s when you can take a stand and refuse orders. And so far, that hasn’t happened

I think they’re doing well. I haven’t seen them raise a finger to the protesters, they just stand there in a line calmly. The protesters are great with them too, they just keep yelling “you should be over here with us”. And with any luck, the courts will give them back to the governor so they can go home before they have to make a hard choice

I never said white genocide. That’s the problem here - you’re talking just like a fascist, but from a position of the oppressed. Which is to say, you’re talking just like a fascist

You’re talking about taking the land (soil) back for the indigenous people (blood). You’re not talking about benefiting people. You’re not talking about fixing problems and making life better.

Just taking. Take our county back. Take our land back. Drive out the invaders. Sound familiar?

The thought “white genocide” genuinely never crossed my mind in all of this. Because I’m not a fascist. I just know when you combine racial lines and fascism, you’re talking ethno-state, which always means genocide. In this case, who gets genocided? Everyone but the in-group, starting with the most disadvantaged and physically identifiable and working inwards from there.

Instead I think of just people, all living in an oppressive system. I don’t care that some are less oppressed, I don’t care about what was taken from people generations ago or who “deserves” the land. I care about reducing the oppression. Human dignity.

Not what we can take, what we can give and what must be taken to give that to the people. All the people.

You’re framing this just like the Nazis do, it doesn’t matter if you flip the “in group” to be a minority or more oppressed group. You’re still using the same framework, which there is a descriptive term for: Fascism

A reverse Nazi is still a Nazi.

You want to talk about freedom and autonomy? You want to talk about resistance, breaking chains, freeing people from exploitation? You want to talk about the West and the oppression of uncontrolled capitalism? I’m all for that.

You want to bring race into it, talk about the true owners of the land and the invaders? That sounds a lot like blood and soil to me.

People live where they live. Trying to build an ethno-state is always going to eventually lead to genocide. And you’re really dancing around that idea hard, just like the far right did before they went full mask off… You’re not saying it, just asking questions, right?

Don’t frame this by race. If you can’t frame this in the context of human dignity, you’re just pushing another flavor of sparkling fascism

You think they should get office space while they serve their sentence?

Wdym? These pictures are going to go down in history. Why would they want to avoid their natural place in the history books?

The herbivore/carnivore/omnivore distinction is pretty stupid to begin with

There are a few animals that have a single food source. There are many that require certain things in their diet. There’s basically nothing that exclusively eats meat (although there’s many who need it) and there’s few if any “herbivore” that won’t take a little extra protein if they don’t have to chase it

I mean… It’s a tech demo for palantir too I bet, Lockheed is showing off for the public but palantir is going to show off what they gathered on the public

WTF… Portland had the winning recipe already - those little micro homes on parking lots were working great

Fucking hell, why would you destroy the shanty towns before you give them somewhere better to stay??

I was about ready to fight you and all… Why can’t we have nice things…

What is she not doing about it that she should be?

From my perspective, she’s one of the few politicians acting appropriately

If you think you can create a utopia through revolution, you’re delusional

A utopia can only be built by genuine buy-in. If it doesn’t come from the people, you’re just another authoritarian believing you’ve cracked the code

I don’t even think you’d disagree with this from what you’ve said so far… But can you really not imagine a better world? Can you really not even picture a path where people just are better, without the need for laws or violence?

I get how you might not see a path from where we are to there, but can you not even imagine the best timeline?

I’m going to skip the Italy bit and jump to Trump.

Trump has been a fake all his life. He took a real estate empire and managed to develop it into a smaller real estate empire.

He called the news under fake names to talk himself up. He convinced Forbes he was a billionaire to get the label, but it’s very debatable if he ever got to that point

Until now. He is actually a billionaire now. He’s also a convicted felon. He’s the most powerful man in the world, but his brain is soup now, so he actually is just a voice for whoever spoke to him last

He wants to be feared and respected, but even at the climax of his power he’s still being mocked to his face

Yes, Trump hasn’t faced “justice”, but justice was always a lie. From my perspective, he made a monkey paw wish. He’s got everything he ever wanted, but I think it’ll all taste like ashes in his mouth

Not like that helps the rest of us, but it is satisfying to watch up close

Like most things, it hasn’t been done through the correct channels. I think Trump signed a few orders (with only some of the words from the leaked list), and then his staff occasionally orders an office to drop everything and ensure they’re newspeak compliant

I do know removing anything except male/female from the gender drop down boxes was a big push, the white house website is getting a lot scrubbed, but it’s all very inconsistently applied and disorganized

No, that’s the end goal of authoritarians. Liberal authoritarians think the perfect system of laws will maximize freedom without affecting the freedom of others, conservative authoritarians think the citizen should serve the state

Both of these are totalitarian dystopias - it dehumanizes people and enshrines the state.

The “your freedom ends where your fist meets my nose” axiom is one axiom, it doesn’t describe a society. Libertarians maximize this as the full limit of state involvement, anarchists can maximize this as a guiding principle culturally with no state

Billionaires have publicists. Forbes itself was basically made to glorify the ultra wealthy. Every last part of her story is sanitized for the public, I think the Walmart family were actually the trail blazers of the practice

A billionaire isn’t a person. They’re an avatar for their wealth. I mean that literally - they are slaves to their own dragon hoard.

Their wealth isn’t real, it’s speculative - so if a Walmart heir gets drunk on video and it goes viral, on paper their whole family loses money on paper. As do the other shareholders…aka, the other billionaires.

And so, they don’t go out in public without careful preparation - instead, the ultra wealthy spend most of their life in places with tight information control. They don’t get to go outside freely, but they can fly across the world on a whim to visit these places

And so, their social circle is made up of people they interact in those places - namely, billionaires who are also sitting on similar ephemeral dragon hoards. Ones that overlap with the other hoards

And that’s why there’s no good billionaires - they’re interdependent. They can’t just wake up and decide to go off script… They’ll be shunned at best, maybe have their wealth cut off, maybe literally put on house arrest or straight up assassinated… It’s not like the law applies to billionaires

Anyways, the point is this:

She’s a fucking dragon. Sometimes dragons are useful, sometimes they’re pointed at your enemies. Sometimes they even do good things

But dragons aren’t persons. They don’t love like people do, they don’t have morals like people do. They don’t walk among us or care if we die horribly.

When a dragon is on your side, no they’re not. Their hoard always comes first