"I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about."
-Agent Smith(The Wachowski Siblings) from The Matrix
"I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about."
-Agent Smith(The Wachowski Siblings) from The Matrix
Sigh
unzips
...Until at last, I threw down Reddit and smote its ruin upon the mountainside.
Its worse than that. A corporation starts a charity or gives 100k to one. Real nice right? Nope.
They will:
use that to decrease their tax burden, robbing the commons of their share of taxes to repair the infrastructure their semi-trucks and businesses disproportionately use and tear up, the public educated, pre-literate workforce they have access to, and then...
they ADVERTISE how noble they are, spending millions upon millions in ad buys to tell you what how awesome they are for donating that 100k. They use the guise of what is supposed to be giving with no expectation of return, ie "charity," as a marketing strategy, and then...
They use such initiatives as lobbying tools to explain why their industry doesn't need to be taxed to institutionally, societally address the issue that is currently subject to the transient whims of charity.
There is nothing a publically traded corporation does that isn't done out of greed, that isn't calculated to provide more return than dispursment. Nothing.
Charity with any expectation of return, beyond a warm fuzzy feeling inside, isn't charity at all, but there is a word for it: a transaction.
And nothing of value was lost.
That's why the only social I used was reddit and now moved to lemmy. Because I would rather ideas rise and fall on their own merits than by the name recognition of who said them. I value ideas, not personas or brands.
Some idiot celebrity/politician/Capitalist Sociopath says something and it gets seen by millions, not because it was worth seeing, but because a famous person said it.
Reminder, the framers were imperfect products of their time, many of whom owned slaves, suggested landowners be the only class allowed to vote, and created a flawed document that, while ahead of its time a quarter millenia ago in the age of gunpowder muskets and speed of horse communication, blue screened windows 95 style a long time ago in the face of modern scale and structural societal change.
For all the camps we've freed that get unfreed, abortion, civil rights, on and on, We NEVER seem to get around on marching on Berlin. In fact, Berlin has has been reinforcing its walls and turrets unopposed for over 50 years. They do make so many jobs after all. We hate the camps, but ignore the ones that commission them.
Are you familiar with the concept of diversionary warfare?
There is no hope if we can't even recognize the tactics being used against us.
How would one sustainably protect/save the Jews (and all the other victimized groups) without first dismantling the Nazi regime?
Sure you can free this camp and that camp without marching on Berlin, but if the machine, the source that propagates it and maintains it remains intact, you're addressing a symptom of the primary cause and they'll just build more camps.
If you resolve one social wedge, they'll stoke another in it's place through the government they fully captured decades ago. Why do you think they're actively unresolving decades settled resolutions through their Federalist Society judges?
Practiced insatiable Greed that rises to a level that becomes dangerous to society, that makes you more powerful than your single vote, that lets you buy your own regulatory bodies and inform the laws that are supposed to regulate you for the public good needs to be disallowed/criminalized. Without that, it's a never ending game of division wedge whackamole, and you only need to understand who that benefits, the modern masters/profiteers/"job creators."
An economy is supposed to be a tool to better distribute good and services for the benefit of a society, ie the people in it. Our society lives in service to, and is often told we need to make sacrifices for, our beloved 🌈economy. We're doing it backwards, we are being played, it's so obvious that it burns.
Not all, but nearly all.
Abortion should be legal and available to all women, that said, around 40% of them are done for economic reasons: https://bmcwomenshealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1472-6874-13-29
Hence the issue is greatly exacerbated by our capitalist dystopia.
I don't think I need to l source the economic growth incentive for exploiting undocumented immigrant labor they invite, while at the same time propagandizing half the country to hate them so they don't gain social footing to get fair pay.
Climate change, hmmm...
Collapse of the nuclear family and birth rate, hmmm...
K-12 educational collapse due to tax breaks for a certain economic class in almost every state, hmmm...
Higher ed being bastardized from a societal necessity to a for profit indentured servant factory, hmmm...
Food deserts and urban decay from big box stores killing main street to eliminate threats and then pulling out of those neighborhoods once succeeding leaving nothing but abandoned disaster areas, hmmm...
I'm sure there are some national problems that aren't caused by, substantially exacerbated by, or intentionally stoked for division by our owner class through their captured governments and bully pulpit, but without addressing our rigged economy and the wealth class gaining more hard power year after year, I'm sorry but it's deck chairs by comparison.
Once again, social wedges. Indentured servitude never went away, it just rebranded. The almost entirely caucasion owner class did cling to using race as the ultimate tool for coerced labor, but after generations of resistance, and the unquenchable quest for unsustainable growth, more than half a century ago decided that having a racial underclass in a largely white population simply wasn't enough exploited labor to increase their wealth and power fast enough, as it's never fast enough.
The poor, true believer Fox News consuming racists are the cultural remnant of that long abandoned unspoken compact between the wealth class and their once favorite colored, highest ranking capital batteries when it was convenient. Racism is real. Racism is wrong, but to the oligarchs, it's become just another tool to manipulate their labor pool.
Some might see it as poetic justice on the once complacent white peasants who took solace in being the richer, more socially powerful peasants, and that's fine, but unproductive, as we have a common enemy who manipulates and stokes such anymous with the means of major media propaganda they own to maintain productivity. It's easier than chains, it's more insidious than Jim Crow. Just turn half fhe peasants against the other half and they'll never look up. You can't argue with the effectiveness.
This belongs in the lemmy version of r/ihadastroke