• MrSnowy@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    Hot take: corporatism and infotainment. You control money and information, you control the world.

    • Potfarmer@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Next year will mark my 16th year voting for democrats, all they do is kick the can and move the line. While I don’t think there is anything wrong with saying don’t vote conservative, I do think it’s a bit like saying “CLOSE YOUR WINDOWS” when a tornado is coming. We’re screwed regardless of who we vote for, the only thing that changes is the rate at which we’re screwed; that is why Anon is sick of life.

      • 0ddysseus@infosec.pub
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        2 years ago

        Democrats are also conservatives. If you allow the oligarchs and aristocrats to choose who represents you then they will always choose candidates who rule in their interest. You can’t change this system by playing within the ruleset you’re given. Democratic power can only ever be wielded by unions of workers and communes of citizens. Those organizations combine and concentrate the power of regular people and can effectively wield this against the ruling class.

  • SeatBeeSate@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 years ago

    I wonder if it has anything to do with the system we’ve built to buy and sell products, owning, trading and hoarding capital? No, that can’t be it…

    • KurtVonnegut [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      2 years ago

      The constant revamping of the production process, the uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, and the everlasting uncertainty and agitation of society distinguish the bourgeois era from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away. All new-formed relationships become outdated before they can solidify. All that is fixed melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned, and people are at last compelled to face with sober senses their real conditions of life, and thier relations with each other.

      -Some guy, in some manifesto, in 1848

  • betelgeuse [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    2 years ago

    The purpose of your life is to be a productive asset for people who make their living owning productive assets. They are in charge of the government and the economy and will never vote themselves out. They will kill to maintain their status as owners of productive assets because they do not want to become owned by someone else. They do spend a lot of time making sure you’re over stimulated because not only do you make the product for them you also buy the product from them. You’re a little blood bag in multiple ways and they are leeches.

    They need you to vote for them, to make their actions legitimate so the whole thing doesn’t erupt in violence and get them killed. The most effective way to do that is to build a bunch of windmills at which you’ll tilt. They can’t make you hate other people for owning productive assets, so they have to come up with other reasons. And those reasons also have to work in their favor, as in make you hate their competition and enemies. You hate their enemies, who also own productive assets, but you hate them for largely abstract reasons detached from the actual reality of your exploitation. This dissonance creates malaise unless you feel like you’re discovering a deeper truth by buying into more propaganda. You get on another dopamine treadmill which ultimately leaves you unsatisfied no matter how angry you get. Because it’s never about recognizing your actual situation.

    They need you to keep making product for them, because if you run out of product to make, they lose their livelihood. You also need to keep buying product. They sell you everything you need, making sure there’s as many people between it and you as possible, each extracting some profit. This causes friction which causes malaise. Once everyone has everything they need, they don’t sell as much product. This is bad so they invent need, they try to make you want stuff so you keep buying. This means they need more productive assets like yourself, this grows their empire. They come up with more abstractions for why you’re unhappy and how buying product will satisfy you. But with the accumulation you are still left unfulfilled.

    This isn’t new and owning productive assets isn’t as profitable as it used to be. You need more and more to make the same amount of money, to keep the same amount of power. So the expansion and accumulation of more involves people like yourself being made miserable. They need war to go into other places and take over those productive assets. They need you to be on board for war so they have to demonize the other productive assets like yourself. They need you to fight in the war so you lose your friends and family. But to make up for that they abstract that exploitation away with fictions as well.

    A society that allows a few people to collectively own all or most productive assets (ie, labor) will always result in this malaise. It will never bring you contentment. And if, by some chance, you get to own productive assets are now happy because you’re free from being owned, millions of others will take your vacancy from the working class. So you’re happy but they are not and their discontent will ultimately bring conflict, which makes you unhappy again.

    Human experience is not profitable, or I should say, it is. As you’ve noticed, the amount of human experience you can afford or make time for is almost none. Your entire human experience is consumption and production. Even when you have fun you must consume product. You must pay a series of people who own the productive assets that produce your enjoyment. Reality is not helpful to the owners of productive assets. It just gets in the way.

    You can’t imagine an alternative because the prospect of another promise of freedom from being owned is just too scary. You’re better to go with the devil you know.

    You’re not unhappy because you’re possessed with bad spirits. You’re not unhappy because of some abstraction living across the ocean that exists to threaten your other coveted abstractions. You’re unhappy for a precise and easily explainable material reason. That reason is that you are exploited and are actively prevented from stopping it. You are manipulated into believing that exploitation is actually freedom. So in chasing freedom you either further exploit yourself or exploit others, adding to the general friction of society and life, causing misery.

  • purahna@lemmygrad.ml
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    2 years ago

    so many people are getting to the point that they can identify that capitalism has caused human society to self-digest and go to shit, yet so many will give the most asinine dog-brained reasons as to why. It’s reassuring to see people starting to wake up but frustrating to see them groggy, incoherent, and still half-asleep. 95 times out of a hundred they’ll blame “corporatism” or welfare queens or race mixing or overpopulation or some shit and it’s just exhausting

    • OKRainbowKid@lemmy.sdf.org
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      2 years ago

      Not a fan of capitalism myself, but I’d take western (somewhat) liberal capitalism over the authoritarian alternatives (kleptocratic, imperialist oligarchy in Russia or fake-communist dictatorship in China) that are being pushed here on Lemmy.

      • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        2 years ago

        I don’t think anyone is pushing modern capitalist Russia, although kleprocratic, imperialist oligarchy describes the US and western liberal democracy at large as much as it does the Russian Federation.

        China though has a better democracy than the US. Calling it a dictatorship is pure western brainworms.

        Edit: Why do you think the US is not a kleptocratic, imperialist oligarchy? And why do you think liberal democracy is more democratic than full process democracy in China?

  • Mir@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    Is this supposed to be a “the world has turned into shit” take, even though it’s been like this for ages (way before the 4chan poster, or anyone alive for that matter, was born)?

    • Shinji_Ikari [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      2 years ago

      Modern life as we know it is relatively recent. Maybe 150 years MAX. Sure things have always had a tinge of bad, but take things in context.

      We’re in an age where our grandparents or great grandparents, people we had exposure to and spoke to, experienced the start of monumental technological advancement in a relatively short period of time. Cars, planes, phones, movies, photos. Consider how much of your life is centered around these advancements.

      We live in an extremely different and short lived period of humanity, where people we end up putting in charge of important societal tasks speak as if things like the economy are laws of nature, despite existing in its current form for maybe 2-3 generations at most.

      This poster is experiencing the culmination of these advancements. The alienation, the over stimulation, the speed at which life takes place. It’s starting to show itself as a bit of a dead end as the ice caps melt away.

  • Zink@programming.dev
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    2 years ago

    I’ve gone through a lot of crap to learn and really believe that happiness and contentment can only come from within. The outside world has a lot to offer, but it will never give you that.

    Unfortunately the outside world and circumstances CAN make it pretty damn difficult or impossible.

    It’s a cliche to think of a monk or philosopher saying stuff like “if you want to be happy, be happy,” but that’s a lot of how I I’ve come to see it. And obviously it’s not that simple, we are pretty damn complicated, but that’s the spirit behind it.

    • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      2 years ago

      I get what you’re saying. There are ways to think that can help people feel happier or better on a personal, individual level. Thats more or less what some forms of therapy can do for people, and its a very good thing, again on an individual level.

      But the context in that piece, and where i would put the emphasis, is that its an example of capitalist alienation and atomization. There’s no individual answer to that. It’s something that is pushed onto all of us through our relationship to capital, and to truely end that malaise, we need to work toward ending capitalism itself.

  • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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    2 years ago

    Everything is about money, not about having an actual human experience.

    Human experience is still there, everywhere. You have to make the effort to get out of your burrow and do things outside with physical people.