ChildeHarold

agreed. just for the record so nobody plays the "you never denied it" card: I'm totally opposed to antisemitism, I denounce discrimination on the basis of any ethnicity, race, or gender in the strongest possible terms.

I corrected it. I didn't mean in an ethnic sense, I meant in a foreign policy sense (like, Trump is very pro-Israel, and I happen to think that Israel manipulates the U.S. and we need to stay the heck away from them).

Long but I think worth reading:

There's this weird subliminal level of crime that exists among the upper echelons of society and yet remains below a response threshold, where the perpetrators put layers and layers between themselves and their victims, and disguise themselves in the trappings of class propriety, societal respectability, and commercial success. Then they all link arms, taking part in each others crimes, creating a diffusion of responsibility that like zebras herding together blends them and makes it difficult for we the lions of the people to find a target to blame. Who is to blame for United Healthcare's denial A.I.? the CEO? the Board chair? other members of the board? majority stock holders? the CFO? the business strategist who came up with the idea? the engineers who designed the A.I.?.

They drench themselves in plausible deniability, and THEN they align themselves with the very systems of civilization - the legal system, the healthcare system, the industrial sector - in such ways that reduce the possible forms of retaliation to almost exclusively include those that exist above legal response thresholds (i.e., the only way to punish them is to shoot them in cold blood, as everything else requires too much sophistication and power and takes too long)... and they do this so that they can hold us hostage against ourselves, blackmail us with our own livelihoods, so that we won't dare rise up because it could mean collapse of society as we know it, so that they can persecute us viciously if we try to punch up. They make themselves small, distant, moving targets, like trying to kill a swarm of bees with your bare hands or trying to spear a whole school of fish. Some of them even want to upset us, to provoke us to this violence, to use us to tear down and overthrow the bee hives of institutions and systems that bring power to their competitors.

And if we ever win, if we ever strike a blow, they adjust. They tighten security, deprive us of rights, imprison our supporters and spokespersons, and learn from their mistakes. They evolve. But they don't repent. They can't repent. Few and far between are the good men and women who as Rudyard Kipling said have the tenacity to "walk with kings and yet not lose the common touch". All the remainder are numbed, warped, and consumed by the insatiable hunger that drove them into their seats of power. Like hardy weeds that break off at the stem, their roots are deep and they grow back rapidly, spreading everywhere.

This is the nature of the elite. And it is the reality we face as the common masses. And although Rousseau was right that man is born free but everywhere is in chains, so too was Dylan Thomas when he observed "I sang in my chains like the ocean". I'm reminded of the Menu with Anya Taylor Joy where she accuses the angry masses of creating the very problem that has set them about in such a murderous fury: "you don't cook with love, you cook with obsession". We listen to the elites, we join their cults of personality, believe in them, we call them our heroes and we worship them with this petulant infatuation and fandom, all while failing to raise heroes that can deliver us! It is up to us to cultivate in our homes, our friends, and our lives people who can keep the common touch and who hunger to deliver us! We'd all rather be consumers. Ultimately, we are just as responsible for this mess as the elites who have entrenched themselves. We pay for that crappy healthcare plan rather than die in defiance to the despots. We vote for the doddering old carpet-bagging establishment fools that sniff the hair of our daughters on national television, and then we vote for the gluttonous lechers and foreign assets to take their places! We sit at home, we type away on keyboards, we let them shovel the social media slop down our throats.

And those of us who don't engage in the fervor are merely pissed off, retreating into the intellectual to make up for their own social incompetence. Or they disguise their own insufficiency as "righteous anger" that they redirect at elites who don't even know they exist. It is a chicken and the egg. We have created our hell, and we refuse to do the work necessary to transform it to a heaven. We exist in a binary, where we're either victims or violent revolutionaries. Because we are insincere. We are wrong. And we are unworthy of a better world.

If there is a hell, if there is a punishment after this life, then surely we will be there along with the people we claim to hate so much to a point of exulting in their murder.

Those are 100% augmented.

that's the thing that pisses me off: the tax often increases the perception of how much people are willing to spend. even if you remove or decrease the tax, the companies just inflate the price to fatten their margins. Rule #1 of capitalism: the consumer always loses.

I mean, stupidity and group think are just parts of having conversations in large groups as happens on these internet forums. I have not been impressed with the quality of intellect on Lemmy. But at least its not like Reddit where every mildly interesting subreddit has a minimum Karma count of like 30, and at least I'm not getting permabanned left and right over completely benign BS like saying I think Christianity is a net positive. I can say what I want here, and people can downvote it and I might even get mobbed... but at least I'm not being micromanaged.

Reddit sucks. They're the reason I came to Lemmy. They're absolute trash.

cultural perspectives. anti-LGBTQ stuff.