When the cringy rich dingus tells you to code something that is impossible to do with the current infrastructure and the timeframe but instead of explaining because you know he’ll have a temper tantrum, you just do the best you can knowing it won’t work but are already looking for other jobs so you don’t actually care that much.
“As you can see I have made you appear to have a boyfriend who loves and cares for you deeply. I bet you feel quite foolish now for protesting against fascism.”
First he came for escrow services, and I said nothing, because I didn’t know anything about escrow services.
Then he came for cars, and I’m not a huge car kinda guy so meh.
Then he came for rockets, and a rocket scientist I am not.
Then he did something, I think, about tunnels. Who knows about tunnels? Anyone?
And then he came for software/social media, and I, and a whole shedload of people happen to know a fair bit about software and social media, and then we knew he was an idiot, and it was too late.
It's OK, most people don't know much about escrow services. They're usually too scared to even ask. Just make sure you pay her with cash and don't trust anyone who let's you go without a condom.
The creator of these comics is a Christian, with the message of them being a Christian message/allegory.
The message here is that if you disconnect yourself from God and try to live independent from God, you lose your purpose and/or are helpless to fulfill your “true purpose” (which, to a Christian, “true purpose” = serving/following God).
That said: I’d strongly suggest that people stop posting these comics and giving this guy attention. They’re meant for Christians and are not really relevant to people outside of that.
EDIT: I made a (regrettable) visit to the website to satisfy my curiosity and found the title & description:
Absolute Freedom – God (in control of all things) gives us freedom to choose what to do, but we don’t get to choose the outcome.
The puppeteer can make you cut your own ties at any time and leave you in a ditch 'cause you were kept a dependent weakling. The author is accidentally promoting self reliance, because that interpretation is not allowed to him or his public. Stupid comics.
What’s missing is that you haven’t drank the Kool aid, if I had to guess. They lean entirely on you being a believer (and usually a devout one) for any of their material to land, whether it’s comedy or drama or music or whatever.
I also feel they think too highly of themselves, and aren’t willing to laugh at themselves. A lot of humour relies on being willing to laugh at yourself, your mistakes, and your beliefs, and Christian fundies aren’t willing to do that.
Most of these people only have billions in stocks. 2 things would happen if they sold these stocks: the stock prices would decrease (leading to them losing a lot more money than they would plan) and other people (with worse entintions) would buy the stocjs so they control the company and then push anti consumer changes
They sure aren’t. They give up their wealth, but by doing so gain more power. They get to decide what is important for the world by dumping millions of dollars in their favourite charities. Charities that they conveniently get to put their names on to feel good about themselves.
try this for tedium.. if you don't understand that being a billionaire is unethical, you aren't human.. because that sentiment only grows from here, so you need to get used to it..
Here's a hint for you: no matter how much boot you lick, or how much you defend the indefensible, they're never going to know you exist and you're never going to be one of them, so you're not only humiliating yourself for nothing and shooting your own foot, but the rest of our feet, too, by allowing those who exploit us all (yourself included) to continue to do so uninterrupted while their hoards of pathetic sycophants fight their battles for them.
I’m not quite sure what you’re missing. The entire premise of those post and this thread is that we don’t think billionaires should be allowed to keep their money and power because being a billionaire is morally wrong. Why would we let them “win?”
So they're not allowed to have the money...and they're also not allowed to donate it? Am I clear? Because that seems stupid, tbh.
The world worked a little better when philanthropy was encouraged for the tax break. It always will. They get their cute little name on a plaque, whatever. The money goes where it's needed.
This is not to say anyone needs to be able to make that much in the first place, but demonizing one for also getting rid of it is funny
I believe they're alluding to the wealthy funneling their money into foundations and other "charitable" endeavors as basically being a money wash that also comes with a lot of power to influence things. Their charity comes with strings and when you're talking about the vast sums they wield, it has the ability to derail other charities or efforts that may have been more focused on the actual task/problem. If NPR decides not to run a story critical of Microsoft or the Gates's because the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation are donors, does that charity still have a net positive effect?
The money goes where they want it to go, which is frequently not where it’s needed.
And you are correct, they should not have the money, since they didn’t earn it. They also shouldn’t get to decide where it goes, since they aren’t suited to make those decisions. It should be taken from them.
Behold, I am a pedant that agrees with you! However, I do believe that billionaires earned their money… in the same way that a plantation owner earned their terrifying hoard; using their complete moral depravity and means.
Vikings earned their broadly spread genetics in much the same way, complete moral depravity and means. Just because something is stolen doesn’t make it unearned, and just because something is earned doesn’t entitle possession. Theft begets reprisal.
Just examples to illustrate that earning, deserving, rightfully belonging, etc. aren’t necessarily the right words to use in this context, but I guess it could be seen as vaguely communist in the right light. More sociological than political, though. Tax the rich, jail the physically and sexually belligerent.
it’s not a communist sentiment at all. labor theory of value is predicated on socially necessary labor not just doing any old thing.
what youre doing with those statements though is pretty disingenuous. the idea of earning comes from labor (it’s literally the germanic to english word for a laborer and their pay) and has always meant that the subject of the verb deserves the object.
you could argue that the raiding parties believed they had earned their spoils, but in a human culture that generally doesn’t hold that belief, saying it without that qualifier implies assent to the ancient raiding parties belief.
Judging historic people by today’s morals just produces the opinion that everyone born more than 100 years ago probably deserved to have been gutted like the swine they are, which is exhausting but entirely true to modern standards. It’s just easier to think of them as amoral animals- the gazelle deserves the cheetah and vice versa by pure mechanics alone. Abelard castrated himself obsessing about the moral line, which was lesson enough for me.
As I said, I was just being a pedant for funsies. To phrase it another way, billionaires deserve their fortune but deserve its forfeiture a hundred times over. Deserve wasn’t exactly the right word so I poked fun while agreeing with their sentiment in its entirety. It was entirely disingenuous, and I said as much at the get-go.
I didn’t believe you, so I looked up those cases. While there’s a little more nuance to the cases than your summaries, you are pretty spot on. We are all cursed with this disgraceful knowledge now.
They have no legal obligation to be useful, let's put it that way.
There are cops and departments which take an active and sincere interest in community policing and social justice.... but power tends to corrupt, and the almost complete lack of obligation or oversight combined with the weird hero-worship of the right-wing means most cops and departments are not interested in anything except the perpetuation of their own power.
I have to admit, without this community i probably would have given up on this fediverse when i first moved from reddit few weeks ago.
Also on another note, it's very hard to shake off some habits from reddit. I had to really force myself to not wipe out this comment because that's what I'm used to. And i almost wrote about sub instead of community lol
I'm so mad at goddamn Lenin and Stalin for co-opting socialism. We went from the Paris Commune to the fucking USSR?
Now we gotta deal with shit like China being an authoritarian dictatorial hellscape that commits genocide (and denies the groups ever existed). And because they pay lip service to Marx you get people bowing down to grovel at Winnie the Pooh's gaze, or mummifying Lenin and treating him like a deity or something.
And of course then when you say "Hey, capitalism is unsustainable especially when automation starts replacing jobs en masse" people go "YOU MEAN YOU WANNA BE CHINA YOU TANKIE????" And the fact that there is a subset of people (many of whom are right here in the threadiverse...) who would love to be China and openly spread Chinese-style communism where protestors get run over by tanks and turned into a fine paste really doesn't help matters.
They suck all the goddamn air out of the room and cause serious discussions of socialism to get dismissed out of hand as supporting USSR-style "fascism with socialist characteristics".
If these hardcore authoritarian tankies didn't exist, it would be a lot easier to make the point that capitalism is incompatible with democracy as well. I'm not just talking about how money is speech and bribes are okay as long as you call them "campaign contributions".
But you don't see capitalist defenders pointing to Putin or the Democratic Republic of the Congo as examples of the wonders of capitalism. They're capitalist countries, yet they don't get accepted as such by people trying to discredit socialism. Curious. Yet China, Cuba, Venezuela, and the USSR are always their go-tos for discrediting communism. It's almost as if fascism/democracy is largely separated from capitalism/socialism (a fact that's frequently ignored...).
But it's really hard to make the point of "socialism does not mean authoritarianism, you can have democracy in a socialist state" when the largest group of socialists loudly advocate for an authoritarian communist dictatorship where they silence all dissent.
So now we can't have that discussion at all. Even people who hate "elites" and are class-conscious immediately shut down when hearing the "socialism" word because of how badly the USSR and China fucked Marx up.
The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. While some of the concepts Marx presented are still great, Marx’s ideology is as outdated as Adam Smith’s. No modern day economists are quoting The Wealth of Nations so I don’t understand why people who want to fix modern economies are quoting a man who had no idea what a car was, nor overnight delivery via cargo planes, nor tech giants who control our access to information. Marx lived in a different world.
Are you really surprised? You put garbage in, you get garbage out. Socialism as a full state economic system is an obsolete thought experiment dreamed up by a rich NEET who lived in a world economy that predated light bulbs and refridgeration, it’s a dead end that was never going to produce anything but failed states and weird amoral zealotry. It’s beyond me why people think full socialism will ever be the answer, when the iron pen of history has written into stone that the extent of socialism’s usefulness is as the social/welfare component of liberal democracies with regulated capitalist economies.
I may be naïve but I really struggle to understand why anyone would advocate for an authoritarian system, regardless of flavour.
Capitalism is definitely far from perfect. It seems to me to work best when it incorporates certain socialist elements(?), like nationalised healthcare. I feel like UBI could be the solution to a lot of problems with the system. As for my own country (UK), things have got worse since the privatisation/neoliberal policies of the 80s and whilst it feels like we have a good system in principle, it's currently being rowed by a conservative government who aren't putting the necessary funding back into the services to keep them viable. And then people point to those services, saying that the NHS is a failure (by no fault of it's own). I don't understand why we're not taxing the rich more.
Anyway those are just my feelings. No system is perfect, but I don't see why anyone would strive to become like China.
Those migrants were simply people seeking a better life. They deserve far more in terms of coverage and rescue efforts than a couple of rich aholes who spent their money on a tourist trap
I’m not going to say most Democrats aren’t capitalists and in corporations’ pockets. But one party got ACA passed and tried to get some student loan forgiveness passed. Along with a whole number of different laws passed for worker protections and similar over the last few years.
On the other hand, Republicans have Trump who tried to pass Schedule F for government workers which would have taken us back to the spoils system where Presidents hand out government appointments, jobs and ambassadorships as rewards for loyalty. FYI we got rid of this system after it directly caused President Garfield’s assassination.That’s just one of many anti-worker, anti-poor, and anti-people reforms the last Republican president tried to accomplish. We don’t even need to touch the entire Republican party’s fascination with stripped rights away from women and trans people.
Either guy will send the bomb but one guy will reform elections and taxes so that your opinion matters perpetually for every guy after. I feel like that’s worth not saying they’re literally the same.
Also, Obama actually ended a lot of conflicts and shielded a lot of the middle east against violence, even if Biden added shit to the bed filled with Trump’s shit.
The post is about the core policies of both parties being to shit all over the worker while enriching the capitalist class. It’s important to weigh the bad things that Republicans do against the good things that the Democrats don’t do. Why has the federal minimum wage not increased from 7.25/h since the year 2009 despite Democratic legislative majorities? Why did the DNC prop up Hillary, quite possibly the most unelectable candidate in American history, When Bernie had such obvious grassroots support? What have the Democrats done to stop massive hedge funds like BlackRock from buying up all the single family homes so they can rent them to workers essentially creating a slave state? Oh great the average worker is never going to be able to afford their own home in their lifetime but at least our Democratic overlords are making sure employers can’t be racist and students who made bad financial decisions are getting bailed out. Speaking of being bailed out, Democrats certainly didn’t stop the bank bailout of 2008. Guess the party of the people thinks they should pay for the mistakes of the 1%.
Both sides completely throw the worker under the bus.
In 2003 I was working as a Master Control Operator for a local television station. This was complicated work and legalese work. We had to legally sign off on what commercials were being aired, while also doing the job of actually airing them on time, and recording shows from satellite so we could air them. We had to sign off on this legally to prove to the companies that had paid for the ads that they were running when and how long they were supposed to. I literally answered to the FCC and could be fined massive amounts and/or jailed if I screwed up too badly.
I was being paid the Federal Minimum of $5.15 an hour at the time. It hasn’t gotten better. Even complex technical work has been completely devalued.
You’re right. accounting for inflation 5.15 in 2003 would be worth 8.45 in 2023 dollars. That’s a 16.5% loss of purchasing power. That’s before you account for the soaring mortgage/rent rates. But young people are just lazy these days…
It gets “better.” Back then, MCO’s were only expected to do Master Control for one television station, because that’s all the technology could handle at the time. Each local station had their own Master Control division.
All those got chopped up with technology around the time they switched from analog broadcasting to digital broadcasting. Now an MCO handles up to 15 stations at one time. Half the local stations lost their Master Control offices, and soon, their local news with it.
For example, the station I used to work at no longer functionally exists. They only exist as one reporter and one production assistant in a tiny block inside of a strip mall. They do “cut-ins” for the “local news” that airs from their “sister station” over 200 miles and over 3 hour drive away. Screams “local” to me. What a joke.
So now MCO’s can get paid minimum wage with 15x the labor to do!
The ACA fails to provide healthcare access to the most vulnerable and disenfranchised groups. It’s an epic failure and capitist nightmare.
Biden didn’t attempt to forgive student loan debt. If you dig just a bit, you’ll find it was all theater. He even worsened the situation for many. The only people he’s helped are select groups of the “right” people.
He has also expanded the reach of ICE, continued Trump’s wall, and expressed support for the genocidal state of Israel.
I’m not saying Republicans aren’t worse, but it’s foolish to try to silence leftists and progressives when we point out how deeply problematic all of this is.
The ACA was not what Democrats were looking to pass originally. It was a compromise reached with idiot republicans (who mostly wanted no reform at all) in the context of an absolutely massive propaganda and lobbying effort from insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
The ACA could have been potentially a great law, despite being based on RomneyCare… until Joe Lieberman stripped out the Public Option that would have slowly undermined the corporate insurance industry by being cheaper, and was meant to be a path to Universal Healthcare.
Fucking Blue Dog Democrats, they may as well be Republicans.
biden was blocked from doing anything on sweeping blanket forgiveness of loan debt by the supreme court but that hasn’t stopped him from forgiving thousands of dollars of it
The Republican plan Obama chose because they wouldn’t vote against their own plan?
Oh and Biden is the reason we can’t discharge student debt in bankruptcy. He personally helped pass that bill. So happy he tried and failed to undo his own mess. (Which was a half ass plan anyway instead of just making student loans discharchable in bankruptcy again.)
And your alternative for this next election cycle is what exactly? Be crystal clear. What is the realistic outcome of not supporting Biden over any Republican? How would Trump or Nikki Hailey as president be better for the left than Biden?
Feelings about the past are important, but strategies for the future matter more. Biden has done shitty things, but the best Republican would be orders of magnitude worse. We can’t expect bad people to get what they deserve because it usually isn’t possible. The only achievable justice is the mitigation of future injustice. Cosmic punishment can only be delivered by a god, and attempts to enforce it will often lead us astray.
I don’t know why people always assume correctly critiquing democrats for being failures to the left and to workers means they think we would vote for an actual fascist.
Leftist equivocation is more than a simple “critique.” It distorts reality to paint a hopeless picture that encourages apathy and people who unironically choose to not vote for the lesser evil. It brings this both sides bullshit into the realm of acceptable conversation when it really shouldn’t be.
It’s like when Nazis talk about Soros controlling the world and promoting “globalism.” There are valid criticisms that must be made about billionaires like Soros and their promotion of global capitalism, but that isn’t what Nazis mean when they fear monger about them. They single out Soros because he’s Jewish, say he controls the world because of cabal conspiracy theories, and don’t give a fuck about fixing capitalist exploitation. You don’t let the Nazi stay once they become identifiable; you kick them out and avoid feeding their arguments.
Just like how many conservatives that complain about Soros are unaware of the Nazi dogwhistles, many Leftists who equivocate the parties don’t recognize the accelerationist underpinnings. Your critique of Biden isn’t the problem. Unintentionally feeding apathy and accelerationism is where you fuck up. Bring up those critiques in a post that doesn’t promote apathy. A generic “Democrats suck” post would be better than this meme.
I’m sorry. I wasn’t explicit or careful enough in my wording. To clarify, you aren’t the one equivocating, the op of this meme is. The only mistake you made is supporting his argument unintentionally. You’re right about Biden, but context matters.
The internet sucks, and people automatically interpret a critique of a critique as defense of the original point. I do it to others even though I get caught up in the same trap all the time. I feel your pain.
Keeping you placated with those less than bare minimum gestures which, while helpful on a superficial level to some, don't actually change anything fundamental in the grand scheme of things, is exactly how liberals enable fascism.
Equating left and right wings as "both sides" is bullshit, but liberals aren't on the left, therefore pointing out that democrats and republicans serve the same system and people isn't "both sides" at all, it's a statement of demonstrable fact, however uncomfortable that might be - both parties exist to keep those with power and money with power and money, for that to happen, they have to keep you (never mind those exploited overseas, out of sight out of mind) poor and powerless.
For anyone willing to challenge their bias and comfort:
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