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.
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: