Politics has always been a rough business. From the assassination of Julius Ceasar to the infamous Caning of Charles Sumner in 1856 which Congressman Preston Brooks beat Senator Charles Sumner nearly to death on the Senate floor with his cane.
This poor idealist would have an aneurysm if he had a portal to today.
Everyone thinks the world is crumbling because of modern politics, but ‘modern politics’ have been killing us for thousands of years.
It’s very hard to fix things when we can’t even get people to learn that they’re just remouldung yesterday’s issues. Many of these issues have already been solved, but people don’t want to hear the solutions.
So let’s just keep on killing each other, because that helps.
An idealist from 1924 would probably come to the conclusion that overall, the world has changed for the better. Well, until you explain climate change to them.
A real free market would mean that no one gets any bailouts when they fail. All the banks and real-estate scammers would be out of business 1,000,000 times over if we had a real free market.
It would actually be possible to work your way to a better place if we had a real free market where people are chosen by merit for the best positions. The majority of the parasites on the board of executives of every corporation would be fired instantly, because none of them contribute to anything.
It’s not true capitalism we’re living in, we’re living in a corporate dictatorship where the ultra rich are the only ones who ever really win at the economic game we all have to play to survive.
Corporatism & monopoly are the natural evolution of “true” & “free market” capitalism. Wealth accumulates, markets are manipulated, rules are rewritten. There’s a reason we call it “late stage” capitalism.
No argument there. I’m just saying, no one is supposed to get any socialism in a real free market.
When billionaires lose all their money from being stupid, arrogant narcissists, they get bailouts, and regular people go bankrupt because of medical bills, or they lose all their money from trying to keep up with their student debt, we’re fucked for the rest of our lives.
We really need to tax all billionaires by 99% of their money above like…$10,000,000 in one year. We have to set the nominal rate that high, because of the loopholes and deductions, once that’s all accounted for, the effective rate will only be 50% at most.
All these idiots in congress talk about the debt and deficit as a reason to stop the cashflow of disability benefits and social safetynet programs, but then without missing a beat they say that we need to spend even more billions on war or bailing out the scammers on wallstreet that committed so much fraud they crashed the economy in 2008.
Aye. Capitalism is repackaged monarchism and the gentry of the middle lords that grew out of the failed lordships and monarchist politics of the late 1700s, which has expanded to now.
** We were willing to eat the rich back then, and I still am
I believe it is the regular definition rather than the slang definition.
a person who obtains money or other advantage by dishonest, unfair, or illegal means, especially through the abuse of position or influence in politics, business,
I’m confused, doesn’t the way this is written imply that none of that is true, but rather that their newspapers are sensationalized? why is everyone going “same as it ever was”?
edit: yes I’m aware corruption existed 100 years ago just as it exists today, I was just confused about people ignoring the written words of the post
Or that the people of 1923 were not as informed as the people of 2023, so they could self delude enough to believe corruption was the exception and politicians were generally well-meaning except for a few profligates.
In 2023 we can actually do some research and see that by far the majority of them are rotten to the core and the few left have to condone it to some degree in order to negotiate with them. Much like law enforcement, in which there are violent, corrupt officers and those who are willing to lie in court to protect them. Everyone else has long since been ousted.
The non-white neighborhoods in the 1923s (including the Irish and Italian neighborhoods) would be able to tell you from experience that the corruption is through and through.
Except Standard Oil has been broken up 13 years earlier and 1924 was smack in the middle of Prohibition and the illegal transportation of alcohol was called bootlegging. Both the breakup of Standard Oil and the alcohol ban are written down in legal documents, so we can confirm their existence wasn’t sensationalized.
Bootlegging would be the only part that could have been sensationalized, but I see how people drink today and I don’t think thousands of years of human behavior with alcohol was sensationalized, leading me to a conclusion that we as a society wouldn’t just give up alcohol for a decade, bootlegging was almost certainly not sensationalized.
If the contemporary context wasn’t the above, I might have agreed with the implication of sensationalization. Due to that contemporary context however it doesn’t read like that.
leading me to a conclusion that we as a society wouldn’t just give up alcohol for a decade, bootlegging was almost certainly not sensationalized.
Today’s equivalent is the War on Drugs and while there’s a ton of hysteria and sensational coverage as well, it can’t be denied that drugs are HUGE business. Huge profit margins on cheap to produce, addictive products, with government enforcing strict restrictions on supply? It’s the same thing all over again.
We will study the meth epidemic in 100 years and say “how did the government decide this situation was better than the public having access to clean, legal prescription amphetamines?”
They tried, but turns out that anyone who was old enough to do “our times are the worst ones and the future will agree” takes 99 years ago have since shuffled off those mortal coils that seemed to chafe so much.
I still hear 'graft ’ as a noun to mean corruption/bribery her in the UK (tho it’s a bit old fashioned). But if you call someone a ‘grafter’ it usually means they’re good at physical labour.
You just unlocked a memory. When I was a kid there was a show called Early Edition and the guy would get tomorrow’s newspapers and he had to try to change the headline before it happened. I don’t know how I forgot about that.
I think the fentanyl crisis is significantly worse, and the US is known for poor quality alcoholic beverages (even when that reputation is undeserved).
Alcohol I think mildly saves itself on accident too. For instance I had moonshine last night, made by a member of a local biker gang, not the stuff at the store labeled moonshine. Many of the makers charge quite a bit because it isn’t all that cheap to make unless you are mass producing. Generally that means you end up having other Alcoholic beverages with moonshine which the main issue with is methanol poisoning if not distilled properly. ( The methanol boils off at a lower temperature than the ethanol) So if they don’t distill it perfectly the methanol poisoning can set in, but one remedy for methanol poisoning is Ethenol. So if someone is drinking some moonshine and some actually produced by a legitimate company liqour on the side (shots of whiskey or such) they are actually fighting the impurity of the moonshine.
You see to have misinterpretted the opinion. They’re stating that the newspaper focuses on those things so much so that one would assume that’s the only thimg that matters. Much the same as today’s news media with their 24/7 focus on doom and gloom for the views and clicks.
That is, or course, if you’re like the others who seem to interpret the opinion as a commentary on how the world truly was.
If over the course of 100 years, nothing more newsworthy has prevailed to get people’s attention, that the doom and gloom of a century ago is the same as it is today, it’s saying something about the world in general that we haven’t changed. Should we have changed in 100 years? I’d like to think so, but as I get older I know that’s a pretty optimistic view of things.
That author’s paragraph out of context could mean a lot of different things which we can leave up to each viewer to decide.
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