Nah dude, the average person is like (knitting while watching guillotines) "whoa look at those heads roll, I might disagree with Robespierre about some things but his reign of terror is based"
Honestly if somebody's made it to adulthood without considering that it's only the powerful whose stories get spread in a way that's backed by any power, then they effectively hate poor people. I don't really care what's going on in their heads. When the chips are down, they'll be clamoring to round up "undesirables" and still crying whenever a rich person stubs their toe, all because they paid someone to write sensationally about it
Yeahhhh this com is a nice place to go to get away from hell for a second but you gotta remember hell is still a reality when you get back . Chances are the most lukewarm opinion about inequality is gonna set off a vuvuzeula 100 trillion button. It’s instinctive at this point
Oh yes. I've got a coworker whose daughter works at Walmart, and a while back she was explaining their points-algorithm for deciding when you get fired. Her concern was that her daughter would be fired for being in the hospital too much too soon.
I figured it was a given that she'd think the algorithm deciding whether her sick daughter keeps her job was dehumanizing - No. Nope, apparently Walmart has to protect their interests
It’s stuff like this that makes me cackle at anyone who uses the word “authoritarian”
Like, you clearly don’t care about authoritarianism if you’re not pushing back against this dystopian bullshit. I’m convinced that people, for whatever reason, just don’t know what’s in their best interest
Lol yeah, any time I get involved in a conversation about the scary authoritarian hOrDeS it seems to get derailed when I lay into the other person about the number of bombs we drop, the portion of our population we cage, the way we have established procedures for destroying all shelter for the many people we force to sleep outside, the fact that we've done one or more federal operations titled Operation [racial slur], and on, and on
For average people knowing what's in their best interest, Einstein has a pretty good quote about it
[...] The result of [private capital's tendency to concentrate] is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.
any time I get involved in a conversation about the scary authoritarian hOrDeS it seems to get derailed when I lay into the other person about the number of bombs we drop, the portion of our population we cage, the way we have established procedures for destroying all shelter for the many people we force to sleep outside, the fact that we've done one or more federal operations titled Operation [racial slur], and on, and on
In my experience, this doesn’t seem to matter much to people, offline or online. I feel like I’ll never pinpoint it, but for some reason carpet bombing random people across the world (even non-defensively) is nothing compared to being mean to people who have an incalculable amount of wealth and who gets to eat/decide whether life will continue on this planet. I’m really not even sure how people argue against this. We have full knowledge that this hasn’t always been how the world has operated, how people have reacted with force and it’s like it’s mythical or something. It’s truly maddening.
I've been pretty fascinated by that too. I'm not a big theory reader outside of a little Marx and shit, but I heard enough interesting stuff about Frantz Fanon's writing to draw me to his book Wretched of the Earth, and had this to say in his preface for European readers:
But, you will say, we live in the mother country, and we disapprove of her excesses. It is true, you are not settlers, but you are no better. For the pioneers belonged to you; you sent them overseas, and it was you they enriched. You warned them that if they shed too much blood you would disown them, or say you did, in something of the same way as any state maintains abroad a mob of agitators, agents provocateurs and spies whom it disowns when they are caught. You, who are so liberal and so humane, who have such an exaggerated adoration of culture that it verges on affectation, you pretend to forget that you own colonies and that in them men are massacred in your name. Fanon reveals to his comrades above all to some of them who are rather too Westernized — the solidarity of the people of the mother country and of their representatives in the colonies.
Makes sense. The average person is a civility-poisoned centrist who couldn’t care less about wealth and power
Nah dude, the average person is like (knitting while watching guillotines) "whoa look at those heads roll, I might disagree with Robespierre about some things but his reign of terror is based"
Judging by the sheer volume of submarine memes in my work chat this is indeed the case
Oh but they could - wealth to them is evidence of worth. If you have doubts just ask them what we should do about homelessness
It’s all about the framing which is why media orgs are such a good weapon
Honestly if somebody's made it to adulthood without considering that it's only the powerful whose stories get spread in a way that's backed by any power, then they effectively hate poor people. I don't really care what's going on in their heads. When the chips are down, they'll be clamoring to round up "undesirables" and still crying whenever a rich person stubs their toe, all because they paid someone to write sensationally about it
I have bad news for you about the American people
I live in a very fashy town in the deep south of the US - They hate poor people almost as much as they hate queer or brown people
Yeahhhh this com is a nice place to go to get away from hell for a second but you gotta remember hell is still a reality when you get back . Chances are the most lukewarm opinion about inequality is gonna set off a vuvuzeula 100 trillion button. It’s instinctive at this point
Oh yes. I've got a coworker whose daughter works at Walmart, and a while back she was explaining their points-algorithm for deciding when you get fired. Her concern was that her daughter would be fired for being in the hospital too much too soon.
I figured it was a given that she'd think the algorithm deciding whether her sick daughter keeps her job was dehumanizing - No. Nope, apparently Walmart has to protect their interests
It’s stuff like this that makes me cackle at anyone who uses the word “authoritarian”
Like, you clearly don’t care about authoritarianism if you’re not pushing back against this dystopian bullshit. I’m convinced that people, for whatever reason, just don’t know what’s in their best interest
Lol yeah, any time I get involved in a conversation about the scary authoritarian hOrDeS it seems to get derailed when I lay into the other person about the number of bombs we drop, the portion of our population we cage, the way we have established procedures for destroying all shelter for the many people we force to sleep outside, the fact that we've done one or more federal operations titled Operation [racial slur], and on, and on
For average people knowing what's in their best interest, Einstein has a pretty good quote about it
[...] The result of [private capital's tendency to concentrate] is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.
In my experience, this doesn’t seem to matter much to people, offline or online. I feel like I’ll never pinpoint it, but for some reason carpet bombing random people across the world (even non-defensively) is nothing compared to being mean to people who have an incalculable amount of wealth and who gets to eat/decide whether life will continue on this planet. I’m really not even sure how people argue against this. We have full knowledge that this hasn’t always been how the world has operated, how people have reacted with force and it’s like it’s mythical or something. It’s truly maddening.
I've been pretty fascinated by that too. I'm not a big theory reader outside of a little Marx and shit, but I heard enough interesting stuff about Frantz Fanon's writing to draw me to his book Wretched of the Earth, and
had this to say in his preface for European readers:
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