This is in fact incorrect: the right doesn't say corrupt government is the problem The right says trans kids and brown people are the problem. Because the right is dumb as a fucking brick, and the billionaires managed to brainwash the dumb right into hating someone other than themselves.
Senile retired actor mouthpiece for the ultra-wealthy
...who was voted in based on a single issue campaign. The anti-abortion-access movement convinced their flock that abortions were literally as bad as killing babies, and Falwell successfully created a voting block based on that one issue. That base didn't realize it came with massive deregulation, and they weren't smart or knowledgeable enough to care.
Reagan was the beginning of the end. I was fourteen when he was elected.
It's an issue with definitions. When the right says the government is corrupt, they mean socially corrupt. When the left talks about the corrupt, they mean fiscally corrupt.
My favourite logical fallacy is this: big, democratic government having control is bad, there's too little oversight and too much corruption. Therefore, it is better if a billionaire, who rules autocratically without any oversight, is better.
The right thinks that people are socially corrupt. Not the government. They think the government shouldn't enable that corruption. But when it comes down to it, they hate people. They don't hate institutions.
The "right" isn't a monolith anymore than the "left".
While it manifests in different ways the American "left" has been just as willing and happy to sacrifice brown, trans, woman, etc. persons because they are equally dumb and brainwashed.
"If we don't let Israel burn down Gaza we might lose votes and if we lose votes then Trump will win and if Trump wins then it's your fault when minorities are hurt."
I love how at least like a decade ago, Soros and Gates were the only billionaires that the right hated and somehow they also thought those two billionaires were commies or something and that people on the left loved them. Well maybe Gates was doing a solid whitewashing campaign but Soros? Never heard anyone praise him.
gates started getting hate starting the pandemic, apparently anti-vaxx is the key to unifying the "conspiracy theorists(from left to right wing) and right wingers. Soros is a little harder to figure out, maybe its the way he earn his money? through his stocks?
They seem to think this makes him a leftist idol or something, or that he controls left wing narratives and nobody actually wants equal rights for everyone without a billionaire promoting it.
they assume, because the right wing billionaires are doing what they accuse soros/gates of. because most leftists arnt even aware of SOROS, or they care unlike right wingers that seems to suck thier knob at every opportunity. it could be thier mental gymnasitcs, is that soros is trying to help people, rather than be like a typical psycopath billionaire(they are jealous).
granted gates is pretty much a typical billionaires, its epstein files/ ruthlessness during his MS years he was trying to distance himself away. thats why i always felt he was quite disengenious.
Both sides is a pretentious asshole, are you seriously suggesting that 30-40% of all politically active US citizens are pretentious assholes?
I am an independent and I have zero issues seeing the ruling class and the culture they have created as the problem. Blaming it on the government is short sighted and plays into the wealthy's hands. That is just stupid in my book.
I know this is a shitpost, but I've seen people legitimately give this argument like it's a gotcha. It's like, okay? So if we get rid of the corrupt billionaires running the corrupt government, then the other corrupt billionaires will use their vast wealth to seize power for the billionaires again, so the problem is indeed the corrupt billionaires - we need to get rid of them all. It's like taking antibiotics - you can't stop when you start feeling better, you can only stop when you've gotten rid of the whole infection, or it'll just come back stronger.
A system designed deliberately to incentivize greed will inevitably reproduce these exact circumstances, the greediest and least scrupulous always rise to the top
Fun fact! The picture of the girl in this meme comes from this video, (relevant portion about 3 minutes in) in which she's by far the calmest and most reasonable person involved. She's not even angry, she just has kind of an expressive face, and she looks like that for all of exactly one frame
Some psycho combed through this video frame by frame to find the least flattering picture of her possible. Rightoids need to die out man
I actually didn't know this. She really does seem like a sweet and friendly person. It's a shame she's being used as a symbol for crazy by the right, when she's actually the opposite.
I was just thinking, "what is that woman's story?" Glad to hear it isn't something like she was turned into a meme and whatever little mental health she had shattered, and now she spends all her time shut in her parent's basement. Thankfully, the real story isn't as dark as my imagination.
He wants to return to a glorified past that never existed by tearing down the current system, a return to where everyone is living off the land like early humans ("climbing the vines growing along the Sears tower"). He promotes the idea that men must return to being warriors, and something about the modern world has made them "weak." He promotes that such strength must be used to dominate, and claims it can be used to improve people's lives, as he claims with Raymond K. Hessel (whom Tyler threatens to murder if Hessel does not follow his dreams), despite the fact that Hessel is most likely left devastated with trauma and unable to move forward due to fear of being murdered. We never see Hessel's outcome, so Tyler gets to pretend he "helped" by completely traumatizing a person (reminds me of Trump bragging about "lifting people off of food stamps" when he actually kicked them off and made them more hungry, his followers don't see the outcome so they just believe the lie). Tyler captures the attention of disaffected, alienated young men and brings them under his wing to become part of their in-group, making them more likely to go along with extreme demands because now they have found family in Project Mayhem. He literally beats the living shit out of one of his men, destroying his pretty face, and yet still commands the respect of his men while disfiguring one of them potentially permanently. With Project Mayhem he intends to bring about his ideal world by force.
So we have numbers 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13 of Umberto Eco's 14 features of Ur-Fascism in Tyler and Project Mayhem, in my opinion.
I mean, presenting themselves as just standing for the common man and wanting to tear down a broken system and don't have ulterior motives is one hundred percent on brand for fascists.
Also "waahhh, my penthouse is too nice, my job is too boring, I get paid too much and I'm a bored white man" is the narrator, the man Tyler was covering up, a weak man's idea of a strong man. "I look how you wanna look, I talk how you want to talk, I fuck how you want to fuck." He is literally a manifestation of what the narrator, a weak person, thinks a strong person is.
1 - "The cult of tradition" - At no point he gives any shit to tradition
2 - "The rejection of modernism" - That's partial at best, and partial hits do not count on that scale
3 - "The cult of action for action's sake" - Yes
4 - "Disagreement is treason" - Absolutely not
5 - "Fear of difference" - Dude, how the fuck did you claim he hits that one? Absolutely not
6 - "Appeal to a frustrated middle class" - Yes
7 - "Obsession with a plot" - Yes
8 - cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak" - Their enemies are never strong
9 - "Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy" - Absolutely not
10 - "Contempt for the weak" - Absolutely not
11 - "Everybody is educated to become a hero" - Yes
12 - "Machismo" - Yes
13 - "Selective populism" - Yes
14 - "Newspeak" - No
Anyway, it's complete bullshit to just list those criteria like they are a checklist. I've listed them here just to show that even that bullshit argument is bullshit by its own standards.
Are you claiming that fascists don't need to be authoritarian? It's not on the list, by the way.
Rejection of modernism. He literally wants to return to a tribal society. He says this specifically in both the book and film, he describes the future he sees:
“In the world I see you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rock feller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Towers. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying stripes of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighways.”
Fear of difference. He literally beats the shit out of the pretty guy for being "different" and pretty. Project Mayhem are all forced to dress the same and have no names. They are forced to shave their heads and become his "space monkeys." They are berated for a week in front of the building before being accepted. EDIT: Further, this treatment of the Project Mayhem recruits is authoritarian, they have to follow all Tyler's rules which they repeat them ad nauseum and they have to shed their prior identity to fit into the new group.
Cast the enemies as both too strong and too weak. In the film Tyler plans to destroy credit card companies and reset debt to zero, a lot of people would claim the financial system is an enemy that is strong, but also portrayed as weak when they strong-arm the politician threatening to cut his balls off. In the book he wants to destroy museums, destroying history, writing a new history, which is also fascist. He says museums represent a dead world and that "this is our world now."
Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. They threaten to cut off people's balls who threaten to expose them, the cops are literally about to do it to the narrator/Tyler himself at the end of the film, because stopping Project Mayhem is a pacifist route.
If you don't see the contempt for the weak here and how they only accepted Bob into their fold because the narrator pitied him, I don't know what to tell you. Tyler would have rejected Bob as unfit and weak. When their homework is to go start a fight, the lesson is that most people will avoid fights (and by extension this makes them "weak"). Fight Club is portrayed as "strong" because they will chase a fight. They're different, they're special, they're enlightened by violence (once again, fear of difference).
These are the ones we obviously disagree on, so these are the ones I'm addressing.
But yeah, 10 out of 14 is pretty telling in my opinion. No, this list of Eco's isn't definitive, but it's got good depth and is a good starting point showing that clearly Tyler has fascist tendencies. Enough that I am comfortable calling him fascist
EDIT: Also while there is no strict nationalism, the entire plot is deeply Amero-centric and treats the rest of the world as though it functionally does not exist when it comes to Tyler's plans.
"You wake up at Seatac, SFO, LAX. You wake up at O'Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, BWI. Pacific, mountain, central. Lose an hour, gain an hour. This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time. You wake up at Air Harbor International. If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?"
Not. a. single. foreign. airport. Not even Canada.
It's been too long since I've read the book, but at least in the film it's consumer culture in particular that he's talking about when it comes to modernity. I think most of us agree with him on that one
“In the world I see you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rock feller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Towers. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying stripes of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighways.”
Tyler Durden in Fight Club. There's a similar, slightly shorter version in the film when the narrator is in his "coma" and wakes up to Tyler gone, this is the dialogue Tyler speaks as he is abandoning the narrator just as the narrator's own father abandoned him.
I don't know how to read that any more clearly as a complete rejection of modernity, not just consumer culture.
I haven't read this book in almost 20 years myself, but I remember these salient aspects of the text.
EDIT: Does no one else remember this kind of media from the early 2000's (and really made it around on reddit, it was quite popular) clearly inspired by Fight Club and the "what to do in an emergency" flight cards, which the comic obviously mimics. To act like this wasn't a major theme is literally absurd. The comic is presented in "how-to" format starting as a white collar office worker riot that eventually leads to the office being a tribal society inside the office building.
Brad Pitt plays the character Tyler Durden in the film Fight Club, from which the bottom is a still photo. Thus that is Tyler Durden, from the film Fight Club, as portrayed by Brad Pitt.
The left is saying billionaire are the problem. Their existence is a sign of corrupt system.
The right is saying all the left is corrupt. They don't mind their corrupt politicians.
Also everyone should go check how this left meme started. The lady in the picture was actually very calm and reasonable. Perfect metaphor for how the right manipulates the media into creating stories out of nothing.
Corrupt billionaires is redundant. You cannot have billionaires without a corrupting influence on government. Even if there were such a thing as a "good billionaire", it wouldn't justify the risks posed by all the bad ones.
I'm so tired of libs on this site dude. Go read Rob Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism, it is ahistorical to suggest that the thing you're calling definitive of "left" (whatever the fuck that means to you people at this point) is enough to determine of someone is "left."
Or are you arguing that Elon Musk is correct about National Socialism?
Billionaires aren't corrupt, they're ethically bankrupt; they're the corrupt_ors_.
Government officials are corrupt because they've been corrupted by the billionaire corruptors.
Getting rid of the billionaires solves both problems at once.
It's always funny to me when people say to put the billionaires in charge, it's always just like
The farmer is doing a bad job because they just let the fox into the henhouse, so instead we should put the fox in charge of the henhouse. The fox is best suited for the job because they have a lot of experience with hens and they know all the problems with the henhouses.
This is just acknowledging that the government wouldn't be corrupt without the billionaires. By the logic of your post, the left is correct and the right is not.
But your first sentence in your comment is wrong.
Classic correlation is not causation. With the addition of "if X is Y because Z, if Z wouldn't be, then X wouldn't be Y".
I was on the fence about this exact thing. My logic is that corruption requires wealthy/powerful people to be corrupt in favor of. If there were no billionaire class, no bourgeoisie, there would be no people who benefit from the oppression of the proletariat, so corruption as we conceive of it in modern America couldn't exist.
Of course, people will act unpredictably and some people with power will abuse it, but the whole system of billions being spent on campaign contributions and lobbyist dinners couldn't continue if there weren't entities with billions to spend.
If there were no billionaires, a corrupt person could still have power inside a government. Making it a corrupt government.
Then he could benefit from that corruption and become a billionaire.
It's not a one way relationship.
Corrupt entities make powerful people. And powerful people (sometimes) do make the entities corrupt.
And this is an issue for all political systems.
It's not a "get rid of billionaires and the issue is fixed". We must both redistribute power so it is at more reasonable levels. And clean the entities.
And once the power imbalance is smaller and the entities are clean, it is a constant maintenance fight to keep those entities clean and the power balanced.
A single democratic election can give a lot of power to a person that previously had none. Power is always flowing.
There are a lot of radically different "left wing" ideologies. The quote, you claim to be left wing could probably be attributed to social democrats, maybe socialists, although not really. And that quote doesn't really represent a good summary of what they believe.
I, for example am pretty far to the left, I am an anarchist. I believe, that all forms of unjust hierarchy are a bad thing, be it a companie's CEO or a government and I advocate for flat hierarchies and the organization of society via specialized assemblies. And of course the ownership of workers of the means of production.
So, I guess I would agree with your quote, as I am against exploitation from the government and from billionaires. I just think, that corruption is the wrong way to look at it. The way, capitalism is going right now is not corruption in the sense that is an "error" in the system. Nor is it the fault of individuals or a group of people. It's just that capitalism is set up in a way, that it naturally produces and needs these crisees, like faciasm to once again violently reinforce itself and live on. Capitalism will inevitaly lead to concentration of wealth, because of the power imbalance between worker and employer. And this leads to imbalances in power, which you could call corruption.
So, in summary, your statement could be considered leftist, as that is pretty close to what leftists believe. It's just that a lot of leftists go a bit further and analyze the issue on a systemic level rather than an individual one.
Also, the right is not authentically against governmental corruption, look at them cheering on ice raids or the war in Iran. Wanting to spend more money in state violence is the most "pro-government" thing, I could think of.
There is none. That's why I am an anarchist.
I guess, I worded that in a bad way.
Edit: Maybe, the one exception, I can think of is parents and their children, because children are not fully developed and are missing some important abilities to fully participate in society. Still, of course I believe in letting your child participate and encouraging them to exercise and their autonomy, but there are limits.
That's a hard one. And I will admit, that I don't know everything. I generally think of anarchism not as a perfectly thought out system, that I could implement tomorrow, but as a utopian vision, we should strive towards. But I will give my best shot at answering this.
I'll start with the easiest one: inequality. My vision of anarchism is very inspired by the ideas of Marx, so I believe that all economic activity should be full owned and controlled by workers in some kind of democratic system. My idea would be to organize the economy via "workers councils" where decisions are reached through mutual negotiations ideally with concencus based decision making. In these councils, every worker, that would be affected by the decisions could participate and have equal power. Of course there would ideally be mechanisms to encourage all to partipate in these decision making processes etc.
There would of course be no one at the top, that makes much more than other people so I don't really see a way, where inequality would meaningfully arise.
The general societal order (I guess you mean decision making processes) would be handled in a similar way, so in councils where everyone can participate.
Crime, and general disturbances to the social order would have to be handled through social conditioning and preventative action. One important factor in this is that most crimes happen due to inequality and people acting out of desperation. That source would be probably mostly eliminated. Things like bigotry or rape or something are also, in my opinion happening in a lot of cases because of external social conditioning, so we would have to radically rethink things like education, parenting etc. The capital class also loves to push racism, sexism etc. through the media they controll to protect their own interests. The bugiorsy would of course not exist in my vision of anarchism. Trauma from war or other forms of capitalist exploitation, which could cause you to be sick and do crimes would of course also not exist, because there would be no capitalism nor imperialist nation states.
And still, we could not control for everything. For these cases, we would have to come together as the affected communities and decide on a cases by case basis. There should of course be general rules the community agreed on, but the circumstances should also be considered. A potential action for these cases could be rehabilitation, therapy ect., helping the victims fix the harm caused by the crime and in extreme cases maybe shunning an individual from a community. Maybe we would also need something prison-like for really extreme cases, but I am not really sure about that.
If you want to look at some real world examples, of how (imperfect, but still impressive) real world implementations of this could look like, look at anarchist Spain, Rojava or the Zapatistas. I will note though, that Rojava and the Zapatistas don't call themselves anarchist, but their ideas are still really closely aligned with what I am talking about.
Another recommendation of mine would be reading "The Dispossessed", where Ursula K. LA Guin presents a utopian, but also realistic and imperfect vision of an anarchist future.
I generally think of anarchism not as a perfectly thought out system, that I could implement tomorrow, but as a utopian vision, we should strive towards. But I will give my best shot at answering this.
My question to you is this, what vision should we strive for in your opinion? No system is ever perfect, but it does need to have a considerable degree of practicality in order to exist in the real world for an extended period of time.
My vision of anarchism is very inspired by the ideas of Marx, so I believe that all economic activity should be full owned and controlled by workers in some kind of democratic system.
But this a contradictory notion, is it not? Marxism is an inherently authortarian ideology in both theory and practice, which is why every attempt at it in history has resulted in some tyrannical regime. The idea that you can collectivize an entire economy and redistribute resource as the "collective" (read: government) deems necessary is simply impossible without a great deal of violence, coercion, and theft involved. The only way this idea could work without tyranny is if everybody in a society can magically agree to everything, which again, is impossible. There will always be people who will disagree, people who will resist, and people who will refuse to participate. That's just how humans are. But if these types of people are allowed to do as they wish, then the system collapses in on itself. This is why communist regimes end up killing so many people in their quest to achieve communism, but that in of itself is the reason why communism is widely considered a failure as an ideology.
There would of course be no one at the top, that makes much more than other people so I don’t really see a way, where inequality would meaningfully arise.
I think you misunderstood the point that I was making in my scenarios. I was pointing out how you can't have order without inequality. One of the hallmark defining features of civilization is inequality, not in the sense of wealth, but in the sense of power. In order for people to organize in a society there needs to be people who have disporportaite levels of power and authority that grants them the ability to oversee, manage, and instruct people to act in certains ways in order achieve predefined goals. In other words, if you want a functional society, you need heiarchies.
Also, social heirarchies don't exist because of capitalism, they exist because it's an incredibly useful trait that social animals like humans evolved to better survive in the wild.
The capital class also loves to push racism, sexism etc. through the media they controll to protect their own interests
Like I was saying earlier, things like this don't exist because of capitalism. If your claims about capitalism were true then there wouldn't be any notion of things like war, racism, crime, and so on before the 17th and 18th centuries when capitalism formed, but that's clearly not the case because these all existed long before recorded history were a thing. In fact, a lot of these traits can be found in our closest ape relatives, which means that they're a product of our evolution.
Humans are tribal beings, and our ape brains are literally designed to ensure our survival in the wild. The way that we survived in nature is by forming small communities that we depended on our survival. If you lost your community, you're screwed. Therefore, we evolved to become very protective of our tribes. We are inately catious change and hostile to outsiders because they could threaten the stability of our community, and thus our survival. In modern times tribalism comes in different forms whether its religion, race, sex, sexual orientation, political affilation, nationality, and so on. Even if you manage to eradicate one, another will come and take its place. Obviously we should strive to treat everybody with equal kindness and respect, but we also have to acknowledge that this isn't something that be conditioned away with a change in economics or politics.
There should of course be general rules the community agreed on, but the circumstances should also be considered.
That's already the case now, it's called the justice system. However, you can't have a justice system without a government that monoplizes violence. You need a government to have a police force that enforces rules and carries out punishments... but if that's the case then we're no longer in anarchist situation.
(imperfect, but still impressive) real world implementations of this could look like, look at anarchist Spain, Rojava or the Zapatistas
Impressive how? I think all three are considerable failures. They didn't manage to last long and they didn't achieve anything notable.
My question to you is this, what vision should we strive for in your opinion?
If feel like, that was what my comment was about. Of course it did not address every minute detail, but I tried my best. If you want a more complete vision of anarchism, I would highly suggest you do your own research, there are a lot of great anarchist scholars, that could do a way better job than me, a random person on the internet. As I said, "The Dispossessed" is great, also you could watch this great introductory video by Andrewism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrTzjaXskUU. He has some great and informative videos on his channel.
The problem of anarchism is that it goes basically against everything, that we were taught to assume about the world, because the system can only work, if the people, who are oppressed by it think, that it couldn't have been different. We need to work hard to be open minded and challenge our most basic assumptions.
But this a contradictory notion, is it not? Marxism is an inherently authortarian ideology in both theory and practice, which is why every attempt at it in history has resulted in some tyrannical regime.
That is just wrong. Marx was actually stonchly against authoritarianism, he argued for workplace democracy and was against nation states as a concept. He defined communism as a stateless, classless society. So, even though the Soviet Union pretended to be Marxist or communist, they were wrong. At least if you go by what most leftists thinkers understand as communism.
The idea that you can collectivize an entire economy and redistribute resource as the "collective" (read: government) deems necessary is simply impossible without a great deal of violence, coercion, and theft involved.
You seem to be conflating authoritarianism and violence. Yeah, a revolution might be violent.
But the status quo is already incredibly violent, so it might be the most sensible option we have.
One of the hallmark defining features of civilization is inequality, not in the sense of wealth, but in the sense of power.
The way that we survived in nature is by forming small communities that we depended on our survival. If you lost your community, you're screwed. Therefore, we evolved to become very protective of our tribes.
Like I was saying earlier, things like this don't exist because of capitalism. If your claims about capitalism were true then there wouldn't be any notion of things like war, racism, crime, and so on before the 17th and 18th centuries when capitalism formed
Almost as if there were other authoritarian systems, that tried to protect the interests of their ruling classes before capitalism.
In fact, a lot of these traits can be found in our closest ape relatives, which means that they're a product of our evolution.
Apes are racist and wage war? That seems interesting, where can I learn more?
Impressive how? I think all three are considerable failures. They didn't manage to last long and they didn't achieve anything notable.
Almost as if every capitalist government is doing everything they can to strike down these attempts because if they became successful, they would make other systems look bad.
But also, the Zapatistas still exist and have existed since 1994, so we don't know yet, how long they will last. And yeah, it is really impressive to build an egalitarian, system with flat power structures amidst overwhelming resistance by governments with hugely powerful military force.
Kind of, but I was wondering if there more to it than just Marxist communism?
We need to work hard to be open minded and challenge our most basic assumptions.
But wouldn't the same apply to you?
That is just wrong. Marx was actually stonchly against authoritarianism, he argued for workplace democracy and was against nation states as a concept.
What? This is just pure misinformation. Marx was a notorious authoritarian. This isn't some secret either, he was very, very vocal about it. He went out of his way to criticize, mock, and demean the pacifist socialists of his era as being naive, stupid, and weak. Just look at criticisms of Pierre Joseph Proudhon or Charles Fourier or Henri de Saint Simon. He's literally famous for favoring violence over peaceful alternative in his works.
He defined communism as a stateless, classless society. So, even though the Soviet Union pretended to be Marxist or communist, they were wrong. At least if you go by what most leftists thinkers understand as communism.
Communism was just his idea of a utopian society, it's not his ideology. Marx's ideology is about how he thought societies should get to this utopia of his. His ideology instructed that a society should overthrow capitalism in a revolution, workers should seize all property and means of production by force and kill all those who resist, and then establish a transitional socialist state that represents the workers that rules with an iron fist in order to bring about the social climate necessary to realize communism (dictatorship of the proletariat). Since communism is a utopia, it'll never be achieved, and that's why all the attempts at it in history have always stopped at the tyrannical transitional socialist state stage... the Soviet Union was such an example, Maoist China would be another.
You seem to be conflating authoritarianism and violence. Yeah, a revolution might be violent. But the status quo is already incredibly violent, so it might be the most sensible option we have.
So you're not an anarchist, but a Marxist? Anarchy as a philosophy is fundamentally opposed to the idea of using organized violence to coerce society into doing things that are against people's will.
What makes you think that? There is actually quite a bit of evidence pointing to the contrary
I wasn't giving an opinion there. That's literally how civilization is defined:
"All civilizations have certain characteristics. These include: large population centers; monumental architecture and unique art styles; shared communication strategies; systems for administering territories; a complex division of labor; and the division of people into social and economic classes."
Community does not necessarily need violence towards outsiders. In fact, according to a lot of scientists, human societies were very peaceful for a very long time
Did you read the article that you linked? It doesn't make this claim. It's saying that we have new evidence of prehistoric wars, but it's still too limited and vague to determine the origin of warfare, because the interpretation of that means is also too vague. It doesn't say that humans were more peaceful or more warlike.
Humans, like all the other great apes, can be violent and can have physical fights between different tribes, and we did. Evidence for human on human violence is present in every era and everywhere. It just that it used to be that human communities were small and nomadic, and if they ran into people, they would just move to another area. The only times people fought was if a group was threatening another group or if there were scarce resources. However, around 10,000 years ago, we developed agriculture and people depended on the land they were on. Population and population density both increased due to the increased food production, which demanded more land and resources... and it's not hard to see why competition, and ultimately war, became more intense.
Almost as if there were other authoritarian systems, that tried to protect the interests of their ruling classes before capitalism.
Yes, and Marxist socialism was no different. Instead of the elite being royalty and nobility or economic tycoons or the clergy, it became the rulers of the new socialist government. Every single Marxist attempt in history devolved into being a dictatorship of sorts where immense power was concentrated in the hands of a few who had all the say and no oversight who ended up wrecking havoc on society. This is actually one of the biggest reasons why Eastern European countries despise communism as much as fascism, and rightfully so.
Apes are racist and wage war? That seems interesting, where can I learn more?
I know you're being facetious, but what I said is factual. Obviously apes aren't racist, you just misinterpreted what I said. I said that humans, like the other great apes, are tribalistic. For us modern humans, that has manifested itself in the form of something like racism or whatever other type of bigotry. The point is that the underlying cause for it stems from evolutionary trait that we evolved in nature. The same goes for war. Great apes, specifically chimps, our closest relatives, do have wars of their own.
Again, I'm not babbling nonsense, this is something that's both well studied and well known. This research is literally what made Jane Goodall famous. She studied the Gombe chimps in Tanzania for 50 years, and she found that chimps are very similar in behavior to humans. They made and modified tools, the had complex social hierarchies, they had wars, they were tribalistic, they ate meat, they share bonds and emotions like people, and so on. You'll be surprised by how much of our behavior is actually evolved rather than conditioned. Human nature is very complex and runs very deep.
Almost as if every capitalist government is doing everything they can to strike down these attempts because if they became successful, they would make other systems look bad.
You can't blanket blame capitalism for everything, that's just lazy and dishonest. During the cold war, for example, the Soviet Union spent a comical amount of effort trying to take down capitalist societies. They committed genocides, overthrew democratically elected governments, started civil wars, invaded sovereign nations, installed puppet dictators, launched countless propaganda campaigns, and the list goes on and on. They were after all the other half of the cold war. Yet despite their efforts, which were on par with the US, they failed and capitalism came out on top. That didn't happen because of the CIA, it happened because capitalism just happens to be a better, more functional, and more resilient system than socialism. Accountability is often better than deflection.
In this case, Rojava was actually supported by Western capitalist democracies, and it got taken down by islamists backed by Turkey. The anarchists in Spain were on the side of the Republicans who were defeated by Franco and his fascist army, who were supported by fascist Germany and Italy, so there wasn't any notable capitalist society that opposed them. As for the Zapatistas, they were never sovereign, they're just a rebel group that hasn't really done much. Even the Mexican government doesn't care about them. You talk of a grand conspiracy against anarchist attempts by the big evil capitalist governments, but there really isn't any evidence to support that. They failed to achieve anything, they failed to sustain their movements, and they failed to defend themselves when it mattered.
And yeah, it is really impressive to build an egalitarian, system with flat power structures amidst overwhelming resistance by governments with hugely powerful military force.
But they didn't do this. The Mexican government controls all of the territory they claim, and Mexican law is the rule of the land. Do you have any actual evidence that they achieved this? More importantly, do you have any evidence that this led to anything tangible at all? As far as I'm aware, they only make grand claims, they haven't done much. They didn't build infrastructure, improve healthcare, raise the standards of living, advance science, build universities, decrease crime, they didn't gain sovereignty, or anything really. If anything they did the opposite. They opposed a train project by the government to connect them to the rest of the country in 2020. They dissolved the Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities because they couldn't get a handle crime in 2023. They seceded their claims to sovereignty by trying to participate in Mexican elections in 2018, only for their candidate to not be able to garner enough signatures to even show up on the ballot. This is impressive to you? Like come on, what are we even talking about?
Also the crime thing, what I meant about coming together as a community was assembling councils of people that have expertise in how to handle this, who decide together and enforcing the decisions not through state violence but through collective action by the community.
I pasted this from your other comment for convenience. Based on your evasive wording, I think we both understand that fundamental flaw with the ideology here. Societies require order in order to keep the peace, however order can only be achieved with a certain degree of force (i.e. threat of punishment for breaking the law)... but that directly contradicts anarchism as a concept because anarchy is against order in general because its inherently hierarchal. So you can either have a functional society or you can have anarchy, not both.
Also the crime thing, what I meant about coming together as a community was assembling councils of people that have expertise in how to handle this, who decide together and enforcing the decisions not through state violence but through collective action by the community.
The right in the US only says what their cult leader tells them to say. If he says the government is bad (which he often does when he's not the one running it), it's bad, but when he says it's good, (which he often does when he's the one running it) they say it's good.
Corrupt billionaires was the problem when it was a monarchy. It was a problem when they were plantation owners. It was a problem when they were railroad barons. It was a problem when they were automotive industrialists.
During Hoover, even the US people, who were taught to be terrified of communism knew that what we had wasn't working. FDR pushed the New Deal through as a last bastion of western capitalism, and at that very moment, the ownership class started working to roll all that back.
Curiously, billionaires can't seem to remember the whole thing about the social contract, that to keep the working class from burning it all down, you have to make sure they are compensated enough to survive. They're not doing that, and eventually too many people are going to have a grudge and would rather no system than this system.
You become a billionaire by fucking over just enough people. Too many and they turn on you, too few and you have to settle for being a filthy multimillionaire. The entire job, as it were, of a billionaire is to go as far as you can without pissing off the wrong people. They didn't forget about the social contract, they're just confident that a little more won't hurt.
Edge cases of billionaires who genuinely innovated their way to the top aside (I can't think of any) I think going too far is just a feature of billionaires as a class.
Curiously, we live in an age in which billionaires are glad to broadcast every whimsical thought they have to the rest of the world. Tycoons of previous ages didn't have that capacity even when they wanted it, and the best they could do is hire a biographer.
But because of this, we are certain of how our billionaires today have gone mad with power, believe that somehow they've earned their lucre, and have total disregard of the well-being of the working class, even those whom they've hired and depend upon. They seem entirely oblivious to the possibility of revolt of the masses, or believe that robust surveillance and security will be enough to stop the onslaught. So, too, believed the French aristocracy in King Louis XVI's court.
Stark-raving-mad billionaires are not really a new phenomenon. Andrew Carnegie once got a chill when he realised that J. P. Morgan would totally shank him to take is assets if he could. Carnegie was only slightly less ruthless, himself.
This has created a dilemma for many of them since they want mercenaries and servants to support them in their apocalypse bunkers, but don't want to be at their mercy when suddenly the billionaire, himself, is no longer useful to the killers that he's hired. The only solution that has emerged from futurologists is maybe be nice to them so they don't turn on you. But rare is the billionaire who is capable of actually doing that.
This has created a dilemma for many of them since they want mercenaries and servants to support them in their apocalypse bunkers, but don’t want to be at their mercy when suddenly the billionaire, himself, is no longer useful to the killers that he’s hired.
I just read that the English government is considering a Law that forbids politicians to lie. I actually thought that was the whole starting point of politics but somewhere down the road clearly they must have noticed that no-one cared, so they finally made sure we'd care.
A lil disappointing on the progression charts of evolution, but hey! We now can move on.
We have truth-in-advertising laws, and political campaigns are nothing more than marketing/ promotional/ advertising campaigns, so those laws should apply. If someone is making claims that are demonstrably false, their campaign should be ended, and their entire campaign fund confiscated, and they should be prohibited from ever holding office again.
Extreme wealth disparity is the problem. When people can get vastly more rich than everyone else, to the point they can buy entire governments, the system turns from democratic to autocratic.
It's been a recurring problem in the US for generations, especially since the temptation once a person is elected into federal office (or even high state office) is to forgo fixing the system in favor of getting rich from lobbyist bribes.
Why not run yourself? I bet there is a considerable amount of people willing to vote for a random person who has no known connections to oligarchs, pedophiles or billionaires
I think that must be the most cold take anyone has ever had in the entire history of thinking. There were mollusks who already understood this. This isn't news to anyone.
In my country my side is in power and they're all useless. But it's still better than the alternative, at least we're not at war with Iran alongside the US and Israel. Which is what would have happened otherwise.
Everyone knows it's the rich and powerful who are in control it's why socialism is such an appealing idea, and why of course it will never happen.
Corrupt billionaires controlling the government in a fight to hoover up every last penny of the entire population of the earth are a substantial problem.
The majority of the right doesn't actually care about corruption as long as they see it benefiting them, or hurting the 'other team'. It doesn't actually need to benefit them it can even hurt them substantially, as long as it hurts the other side more and they are told they could have an advantage due to it.
In the end, the left politicians are as into the corruption as the right, they're just better at lip service and nothing is going to change.
Way too much credit is being given to both sides of this. Everybody is just cheering for one team or another with their votes. Whatever they say aloud doesn't really matter because the result is handing over any choice or real practical discourse to a handful of people who are entirely at the mercy of their political parties and the party sponsors.
Choosing a lesser evil is always better than doing nothing but we really need more than two choices at this point. The massive PAC funding has to go and campaigns really need to have extremely strict regulation that is thus far unprecedented imo. We also truly need national ranked choice voting, strict term limits for all elected positions and honestly, age limits too.
Would be nice if we had more popular vote based levers as well to force certain policies or decisions, but the tyranny of the majority has some challenges too. Maybe congress and the courts should be expanded so that more people are involved in the representation of a country that had ~26 senators and ~65 representatives in 1791 when we only had around 4 million americans. We are close to 350 million people now which is 87.5x more than then, so shouldn't the have closer to ~2275 senators and ~5688 representatives? Would be a hell of a lot harder to keep this many people in lockstep with "loyal" party line voting like there is today in our completely fucked system especially with term limits that mean they don't have to worry about re-election (maybe it should be one term only, ever. Longer duration but the citizens of a district should be able to vote to trigger a new election cycle for what's remaining in a term.)
Oh and districts at this point probably shouldn't be based on drawn voting maps. Everybody's social security number should go into a pool and be randomly assigned to a district in every state that corresponds to the amount of representatives they have. The voting places could be the same local ones and the tallies could still be done, we'd just need a number of voting forms in each voting location that corresponds to each district based on the amount of voters. They could even print these out on demand on the day of to avoid waste if we want to avoid a digital solution.
anywho, feel free to dunk on all of it. These words don't even matter, this will never happen. The ones in power run the show and do not want to give up their power.
Not much to disagree with here. I like the thought of future governments that are written to resist corruption. I think you raise several good ways to do this. I think ultimately electing by popular vote has to go away in favor of a system that randomly elects from a qualified pool with term and age limits.
A government has to be designed to resist corruption instead of embracing it.
Soon there will be a critical mass of people who have nothing left to lose. In these times people instinctively, correctly, lash out at those who have the most.
It addresses one aspect of a corrupt government, which is part of one of two main points brought up. It's also one aspect where you'll have to work through the corruption. It does nothing to address billionaires who, as others have already discussed by, would be pushing directly against such efforts.
Guess who's going to have more pull? You, or the billionaires that already have the government in their pocket?
We can debate all day about which step is first (it's all of them), but it's inarguable that simply hoping for a savior to come along and somehow magically win through a corrupt system isn't going to be the avenue to fix this mess.
This is in fact incorrect: the right doesn't say corrupt government is the problem The right says trans kids and brown people are the problem. Because the right is dumb as a fucking brick, and the billionaires managed to brainwash the dumb right into hating someone other than themselves.
-- Senile retired actor mouthpiece for the ultra-wealthy
Senile retired actor mouthpiece for the ultra-wealthy
...who was voted in based on a single issue campaign. The anti-abortion-access movement convinced their flock that abortions were literally as bad as killing babies, and Falwell successfully created a voting block based on that one issue. That base didn't realize it came with massive deregulation, and they weren't smart or knowledgeable enough to care.
Reagan was the beginning of the end. I was fourteen when he was elected.
It's an issue with definitions. When the right says the government is corrupt, they mean socially corrupt. When the left talks about the corrupt, they mean fiscally corrupt.
No, the right is also morally and legally corrupt.
My favourite logical fallacy is this: big, democratic government having control is bad, there's too little oversight and too much corruption. Therefore, it is better if a billionaire, who rules autocratically without any oversight, is better.
As long as it's their autocrat, yes.
The right thinks that people are socially corrupt. Not the government. They think the government shouldn't enable that corruption. But when it comes down to it, they hate people. They don't hate institutions.
The right wanting to eradicate minorities has nothing to do with fiscal corruption. It's just pure evil.
I am declaring war on fat, gay kids.
Finally! A new angle!
They actually say it all the time. Trumps people have been called out in interviews for saying it while occupying their positions.
The "right" isn't a monolith anymore than the "left".
While it manifests in different ways the American "left" has been just as willing and happy to sacrifice brown, trans, woman, etc. persons because they are equally dumb and brainwashed.
"If we don't let Israel burn down Gaza we might lose votes and if we lose votes then Trump will win and if Trump wins then it's your fault when minorities are hurt."
Look what you made me do!!
We are literally caught between two political parties which are both using different styles of psychological abuse to get our votes.
Liberals are center-right at best, the US has no left
George Soros
I love how at least like a decade ago, Soros and Gates were the only billionaires that the right hated and somehow they also thought those two billionaires were commies or something and that people on the left loved them. Well maybe Gates was doing a solid whitewashing campaign but Soros? Never heard anyone praise him.
gates started getting hate starting the pandemic, apparently anti-vaxx is the key to unifying the "conspiracy theorists(from left to right wing) and right wingers. Soros is a little harder to figure out, maybe its the way he earn his money? through his stocks?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Society_Foundations
They seem to think this makes him a leftist idol or something, or that he controls left wing narratives and nobody actually wants equal rights for everyone without a billionaire promoting it.
they assume, because the right wing billionaires are doing what they accuse soros/gates of. because most leftists arnt even aware of SOROS, or they care unlike right wingers that seems to suck thier knob at every opportunity. it could be thier mental gymnasitcs, is that soros is trying to help people, rather than be like a typical psycopath billionaire(they are jealous).
granted gates is pretty much a typical billionaires, its epstein files/ ruthlessness during his MS years he was trying to distance himself away. thats why i always felt he was quite disengenious.
so…. then it’s the billionaires. got it.
For real. Both sides guy is an idiot.
Both sides are now 30% of the electorate or less (pick your poll, D&R are very close).
Independents are now 40% of the voters.
Critical mistake that Dems make is thinking independent means centrist
Both sides is a pretentious asshole, are you seriously suggesting that 30-40% of all politically active US citizens are pretentious assholes?
I am an independent and I have zero issues seeing the ruling class and the culture they have created as the problem. Blaming it on the government is short sighted and plays into the wealthy's hands. That is just stupid in my book.
I know this is a shitpost, but I've seen people legitimately give this argument like it's a gotcha. It's like, okay? So if we get rid of the corrupt billionaires running the corrupt government, then the other corrupt billionaires will use their vast wealth to seize power for the billionaires again, so the problem is indeed the corrupt billionaires - we need to get rid of them all. It's like taking antibiotics - you can't stop when you start feeling better, you can only stop when you've gotten rid of the whole infection, or it'll just come back stronger.
A system designed deliberately to incentivize greed will inevitably reproduce these exact circumstances, the greediest and least scrupulous always rise to the top
Turn it around. Who are the good billionaires? Get their help, their resources, and make politics sane again.
How can we figure out who they are?
The left also thinks corrupt government is a problem
Meanwhile the right proudly advertises their love for corrupt billionaires
Corrupt paedophile billionaires
Fun fact! The picture of the girl in this meme comes from this video, (relevant portion about 3 minutes in) in which she's by far the calmest and most reasonable person involved. She's not even angry, she just has kind of an expressive face, and she looks like that for all of exactly one frame
Some psycho combed through this video frame by frame to find the least flattering picture of her possible. Rightoids need to die out man
I actually didn't know this. She really does seem like a sweet and friendly person. It's a shame she's being used as a symbol for crazy by the right, when she's actually the opposite.
I was just thinking, "what is that woman's story?" Glad to hear it isn't something like she was turned into a meme and whatever little mental health she had shattered, and now she spends all her time shut in her parent's basement. Thankfully, the real story isn't as dark as my imagination.
Ahh the 'enlightened centrist' take, how very boring.
Why does everyone always miss the point that Tyler Durden is a fucking fascist.
Really changes what this meme means.
He's not a good person's identity, by any means. But he's not fascist.
He wants to return to a glorified past that never existed by tearing down the current system, a return to where everyone is living off the land like early humans ("climbing the vines growing along the Sears tower"). He promotes the idea that men must return to being warriors, and something about the modern world has made them "weak." He promotes that such strength must be used to dominate, and claims it can be used to improve people's lives, as he claims with Raymond K. Hessel (whom Tyler threatens to murder if Hessel does not follow his dreams), despite the fact that Hessel is most likely left devastated with trauma and unable to move forward due to fear of being murdered. We never see Hessel's outcome, so Tyler gets to pretend he "helped" by completely traumatizing a person (reminds me of Trump bragging about "lifting people off of food stamps" when he actually kicked them off and made them more hungry, his followers don't see the outcome so they just believe the lie). Tyler captures the attention of disaffected, alienated young men and brings them under his wing to become part of their in-group, making them more likely to go along with extreme demands because now they have found family in Project Mayhem. He literally beats the living shit out of one of his men, destroying his pretty face, and yet still commands the respect of his men while disfiguring one of them potentially permanently. With Project Mayhem he intends to bring about his ideal world by force.
So we have numbers 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13 of Umberto Eco's 14 features of Ur-Fascism in Tyler and Project Mayhem, in my opinion.
But sure, he's not a fascist.
Its been a long time since I've seen the movie but I always thought he was an anarchist who just wanted to burn everything to the ground.
I mean, presenting themselves as just standing for the common man and wanting to tear down a broken system and don't have ulterior motives is one hundred percent on brand for fascists.
Also "waahhh, my penthouse is too nice, my job is too boring, I get paid too much and I'm a bored white man" is the narrator, the man Tyler was covering up, a weak man's idea of a strong man. "I look how you wanna look, I talk how you want to talk, I fuck how you want to fuck." He is literally a manifestation of what the narrator, a weak person, thinks a strong person is.
Fascists coopting socialist language to obfuscate their class loyalties and goals is unfortunately fairly common
Without your bad rephrasing:
1 - "The cult of tradition" - At no point he gives any shit to tradition
2 - "The rejection of modernism" - That's partial at best, and partial hits do not count on that scale
3 - "The cult of action for action's sake" - Yes
4 - "Disagreement is treason" - Absolutely not
5 - "Fear of difference" - Dude, how the fuck did you claim he hits that one? Absolutely not
6 - "Appeal to a frustrated middle class" - Yes
7 - "Obsession with a plot" - Yes
8 - cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak" - Their enemies are never strong
9 - "Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy" - Absolutely not
10 - "Contempt for the weak" - Absolutely not
11 - "Everybody is educated to become a hero" - Yes
12 - "Machismo" - Yes
13 - "Selective populism" - Yes
14 - "Newspeak" - No
Anyway, it's complete bullshit to just list those criteria like they are a checklist. I've listed them here just to show that even that bullshit argument is bullshit by its own standards.
Are you claiming that fascists don't need to be authoritarian? It's not on the list, by the way.
Fear of difference. He literally beats the shit out of the pretty guy for being "different" and pretty. Project Mayhem are all forced to dress the same and have no names. They are forced to shave their heads and become his "space monkeys." They are berated for a week in front of the building before being accepted. EDIT: Further, this treatment of the Project Mayhem recruits is authoritarian, they have to follow all Tyler's rules which they repeat them ad nauseum and they have to shed their prior identity to fit into the new group.
Cast the enemies as both too strong and too weak. In the film Tyler plans to destroy credit card companies and reset debt to zero, a lot of people would claim the financial system is an enemy that is strong, but also portrayed as weak when they strong-arm the politician threatening to cut his balls off. In the book he wants to destroy museums, destroying history, writing a new history, which is also fascist. He says museums represent a dead world and that "this is our world now."
Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. They threaten to cut off people's balls who threaten to expose them, the cops are literally about to do it to the narrator/Tyler himself at the end of the film, because stopping Project Mayhem is a pacifist route.
If you don't see the contempt for the weak here and how they only accepted Bob into their fold because the narrator pitied him, I don't know what to tell you. Tyler would have rejected Bob as unfit and weak. When their homework is to go start a fight, the lesson is that most people will avoid fights (and by extension this makes them "weak"). Fight Club is portrayed as "strong" because they will chase a fight. They're different, they're special, they're enlightened by violence (once again, fear of difference).
These are the ones we obviously disagree on, so these are the ones I'm addressing.
But yeah, 10 out of 14 is pretty telling in my opinion. No, this list of Eco's isn't definitive, but it's got good depth and is a good starting point showing that clearly Tyler has fascist tendencies. Enough that I am comfortable calling him fascist
EDIT: Also while there is no strict nationalism, the entire plot is deeply Amero-centric and treats the rest of the world as though it functionally does not exist when it comes to Tyler's plans.
Not. a. single. foreign. airport. Not even Canada.
It's been too long since I've read the book, but at least in the film it's consumer culture in particular that he's talking about when it comes to modernity. I think most of us agree with him on that one
Tyler Durden in Fight Club. There's a similar, slightly shorter version in the film when the narrator is in his "coma" and wakes up to Tyler gone, this is the dialogue Tyler speaks as he is abandoning the narrator just as the narrator's own father abandoned him.
I don't know how to read that any more clearly as a complete rejection of modernity, not just consumer culture.
I haven't read this book in almost 20 years myself, but I remember these salient aspects of the text.
EDIT: Does no one else remember this kind of media from the early 2000's (and really made it around on reddit, it was quite popular) clearly inspired by Fight Club and the "what to do in an emergency" flight cards, which the comic obviously mimics. To act like this wasn't a major theme is literally absurd. The comic is presented in "how-to" format starting as a white collar office worker riot that eventually leads to the office being a tribal society inside the office building.
Obviously Fight Club Inspired Comic:
Emergency Flight Card from Fight Club:
Tyler Durden is not the good guy holy shit
Probably the same people who thought RATM went political in the mid teens...
In 2007 I was in the passenger seat of my girlfriend's shitty Kia because I didn't have a car.
We stop at a stoplight and up next to us pulls up a shiny new blue Audi, and two fratbros with popped collars and sporting Oakleys.
Their speakers are on extremely loud and blasting System of a Down, specifically "Fuck the System."
I couldn't help but think "Man, I'm pretty sure these guys are the system."
Well....in my defense.....I've never heard of Tyler Durden before. Is that the guy in the meme on the top right?
Bottom-center. This is if like the bottom was Steve Bannon.
.......that's not Brad Pitt??? I thought that was Brad Pitt.
Brad Pitt plays the character Tyler Durden in the film Fight Club, from which the bottom is a still photo. Thus that is Tyler Durden, from the film Fight Club, as portrayed by Brad Pitt.
Wait what
What fascist wants to destroy all the debt records
I saw a yt vid awhile back making that claim. Don't think I agree with it all but it's an interesting take on it
https://youtu.be/SjLOFLE4JRw
This has to be one of the most boomer out-of-touch I'm-a-cool-smart-guy memes I've seen on here, and that's saying something.
Was it them making themselves Tyler Durden that gave it away?
therefore, corrupt billionaires are the problem
Yeah i don't get it. If they billionaires were corrupt but the government wasn't...
What would the problem be?
Its not like that at all.
The left is saying billionaire are the problem. Their existence is a sign of corrupt system.
The right is saying all the left is corrupt. They don't mind their corrupt politicians.
Also everyone should go check how this left meme started. The lady in the picture was actually very calm and reasonable. Perfect metaphor for how the right manipulates the media into creating stories out of nothing.
Corrupt billionaires is redundant. You cannot have billionaires without a corrupting influence on government. Even if there were such a thing as a "good billionaire", it wouldn't justify the risks posed by all the bad ones.
The right elected the most corrupt government we have had so far.
...so far
So that would put you on the left.
No...it wouldn't.
Corrupt billionaires running the government means you think the problem is corrupt billionaires.
What exactly do you think socialism is?
Where did you get socialism from?
We're talking about the meme saying left wingers oppose billionaires.
Anyway socialism is when production, distribution, and exchange are owned/regulated by the workers/community.
I'm so tired of libs on this site dude. Go read Rob Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism, it is ahistorical to suggest that the thing you're calling definitive of "left" (whatever the fuck that means to you people at this point) is enough to determine of someone is "left."
Or are you arguing that Elon Musk is correct about National Socialism?
Billionaires aren't corrupt, they're ethically bankrupt; they're the corrupt_ors_.
Government officials are corrupt because they've been corrupted by the billionaire corruptors.
Getting rid of the billionaires solves both problems at once.
It's always funny to me when people say to put the billionaires in charge, it's always just like
This is just acknowledging that the government wouldn't be corrupt without the billionaires. By the logic of your post, the left is correct and the right is not.
This stinks of "enlightened centrist" meme junk.
Yes, the post is meant to be pro-left.
But your first sentence in your comment is wrong. Classic correlation is not causation. With the addition of "if X is Y because Z, if Z wouldn't be, then X wouldn't be Y".
I was on the fence about this exact thing. My logic is that corruption requires wealthy/powerful people to be corrupt in favor of. If there were no billionaire class, no bourgeoisie, there would be no people who benefit from the oppression of the proletariat, so corruption as we conceive of it in modern America couldn't exist.
Of course, people will act unpredictably and some people with power will abuse it, but the whole system of billions being spent on campaign contributions and lobbyist dinners couldn't continue if there weren't entities with billions to spend.
If there were no billionaires, a corrupt person could still have power inside a government. Making it a corrupt government.
Then he could benefit from that corruption and become a billionaire.
It's not a one way relationship.
Corrupt entities make powerful people. And powerful people (sometimes) do make the entities corrupt.
And this is an issue for all political systems.
It's not a "get rid of billionaires and the issue is fixed". We must both redistribute power so it is at more reasonable levels. And clean the entities.
And once the power imbalance is smaller and the entities are clean, it is a constant maintenance fight to keep those entities clean and the power balanced.
A single democratic election can give a lot of power to a person that previously had none. Power is always flowing.
Um no, that is not what the "left" thinks.
There are a lot of radically different "left wing" ideologies. The quote, you claim to be left wing could probably be attributed to social democrats, maybe socialists, although not really. And that quote doesn't really represent a good summary of what they believe.
I, for example am pretty far to the left, I am an anarchist. I believe, that all forms of unjust hierarchy are a bad thing, be it a companie's CEO or a government and I advocate for flat hierarchies and the organization of society via specialized assemblies. And of course the ownership of workers of the means of production.
So, I guess I would agree with your quote, as I am against exploitation from the government and from billionaires. I just think, that corruption is the wrong way to look at it. The way, capitalism is going right now is not corruption in the sense that is an "error" in the system. Nor is it the fault of individuals or a group of people. It's just that capitalism is set up in a way, that it naturally produces and needs these crisees, like faciasm to once again violently reinforce itself and live on. Capitalism will inevitaly lead to concentration of wealth, because of the power imbalance between worker and employer. And this leads to imbalances in power, which you could call corruption.
So, in summary, your statement could be considered leftist, as that is pretty close to what leftists believe. It's just that a lot of leftists go a bit further and analyze the issue on a systemic level rather than an individual one.
Also, the right is not authentically against governmental corruption, look at them cheering on ice raids or the war in Iran. Wanting to spend more money in state violence is the most "pro-government" thing, I could think of.
What exactly do you think is a just hierarchy? Where is the line?
A DM running a traditional game of D&D?
There is none. That's why I am an anarchist. I guess, I worded that in a bad way.
Edit: Maybe, the one exception, I can think of is parents and their children, because children are not fully developed and are missing some important abilities to fully participate in society. Still, of course I believe in letting your child participate and encouraging them to exercise and their autonomy, but there are limits.
Okay, how exactly do you think things like crime, inequality, or general societal order should be handled?
That's a hard one. And I will admit, that I don't know everything. I generally think of anarchism not as a perfectly thought out system, that I could implement tomorrow, but as a utopian vision, we should strive towards. But I will give my best shot at answering this.
I'll start with the easiest one: inequality. My vision of anarchism is very inspired by the ideas of Marx, so I believe that all economic activity should be full owned and controlled by workers in some kind of democratic system. My idea would be to organize the economy via "workers councils" where decisions are reached through mutual negotiations ideally with concencus based decision making. In these councils, every worker, that would be affected by the decisions could participate and have equal power. Of course there would ideally be mechanisms to encourage all to partipate in these decision making processes etc.
There would of course be no one at the top, that makes much more than other people so I don't really see a way, where inequality would meaningfully arise.
The general societal order (I guess you mean decision making processes) would be handled in a similar way, so in councils where everyone can participate.
Crime, and general disturbances to the social order would have to be handled through social conditioning and preventative action. One important factor in this is that most crimes happen due to inequality and people acting out of desperation. That source would be probably mostly eliminated. Things like bigotry or rape or something are also, in my opinion happening in a lot of cases because of external social conditioning, so we would have to radically rethink things like education, parenting etc. The capital class also loves to push racism, sexism etc. through the media they controll to protect their own interests. The bugiorsy would of course not exist in my vision of anarchism. Trauma from war or other forms of capitalist exploitation, which could cause you to be sick and do crimes would of course also not exist, because there would be no capitalism nor imperialist nation states.
And still, we could not control for everything. For these cases, we would have to come together as the affected communities and decide on a cases by case basis. There should of course be general rules the community agreed on, but the circumstances should also be considered. A potential action for these cases could be rehabilitation, therapy ect., helping the victims fix the harm caused by the crime and in extreme cases maybe shunning an individual from a community. Maybe we would also need something prison-like for really extreme cases, but I am not really sure about that.
If you want to look at some real world examples, of how (imperfect, but still impressive) real world implementations of this could look like, look at anarchist Spain, Rojava or the Zapatistas. I will note though, that Rojava and the Zapatistas don't call themselves anarchist, but their ideas are still really closely aligned with what I am talking about.
Another recommendation of mine would be reading "The Dispossessed", where Ursula K. LA Guin presents a utopian, but also realistic and imperfect vision of an anarchist future.
My question to you is this, what vision should we strive for in your opinion? No system is ever perfect, but it does need to have a considerable degree of practicality in order to exist in the real world for an extended period of time.
But this a contradictory notion, is it not? Marxism is an inherently authortarian ideology in both theory and practice, which is why every attempt at it in history has resulted in some tyrannical regime. The idea that you can collectivize an entire economy and redistribute resource as the "collective" (read: government) deems necessary is simply impossible without a great deal of violence, coercion, and theft involved. The only way this idea could work without tyranny is if everybody in a society can magically agree to everything, which again, is impossible. There will always be people who will disagree, people who will resist, and people who will refuse to participate. That's just how humans are. But if these types of people are allowed to do as they wish, then the system collapses in on itself. This is why communist regimes end up killing so many people in their quest to achieve communism, but that in of itself is the reason why communism is widely considered a failure as an ideology.
I think you misunderstood the point that I was making in my scenarios. I was pointing out how you can't have order without inequality. One of the hallmark defining features of civilization is inequality, not in the sense of wealth, but in the sense of power. In order for people to organize in a society there needs to be people who have disporportaite levels of power and authority that grants them the ability to oversee, manage, and instruct people to act in certains ways in order achieve predefined goals. In other words, if you want a functional society, you need heiarchies.
Also, social heirarchies don't exist because of capitalism, they exist because it's an incredibly useful trait that social animals like humans evolved to better survive in the wild.
Like I was saying earlier, things like this don't exist because of capitalism. If your claims about capitalism were true then there wouldn't be any notion of things like war, racism, crime, and so on before the 17th and 18th centuries when capitalism formed, but that's clearly not the case because these all existed long before recorded history were a thing. In fact, a lot of these traits can be found in our closest ape relatives, which means that they're a product of our evolution.
Humans are tribal beings, and our ape brains are literally designed to ensure our survival in the wild. The way that we survived in nature is by forming small communities that we depended on our survival. If you lost your community, you're screwed. Therefore, we evolved to become very protective of our tribes. We are inately catious change and hostile to outsiders because they could threaten the stability of our community, and thus our survival. In modern times tribalism comes in different forms whether its religion, race, sex, sexual orientation, political affilation, nationality, and so on. Even if you manage to eradicate one, another will come and take its place. Obviously we should strive to treat everybody with equal kindness and respect, but we also have to acknowledge that this isn't something that be conditioned away with a change in economics or politics.
That's already the case now, it's called the justice system. However, you can't have a justice system without a government that monoplizes violence. You need a government to have a police force that enforces rules and carries out punishments... but if that's the case then we're no longer in anarchist situation.
Impressive how? I think all three are considerable failures. They didn't manage to last long and they didn't achieve anything notable.
If feel like, that was what my comment was about. Of course it did not address every minute detail, but I tried my best. If you want a more complete vision of anarchism, I would highly suggest you do your own research, there are a lot of great anarchist scholars, that could do a way better job than me, a random person on the internet. As I said, "The Dispossessed" is great, also you could watch this great introductory video by Andrewism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrTzjaXskUU. He has some great and informative videos on his channel.
The problem of anarchism is that it goes basically against everything, that we were taught to assume about the world, because the system can only work, if the people, who are oppressed by it think, that it couldn't have been different. We need to work hard to be open minded and challenge our most basic assumptions.
That is just wrong. Marx was actually stonchly against authoritarianism, he argued for workplace democracy and was against nation states as a concept. He defined communism as a stateless, classless society. So, even though the Soviet Union pretended to be Marxist or communist, they were wrong. At least if you go by what most leftists thinkers understand as communism.
You seem to be conflating authoritarianism and violence. Yeah, a revolution might be violent. But the status quo is already incredibly violent, so it might be the most sensible option we have.
What makes you think that? There is actually quite a bit of evidence pointing to the contrary (https://newrepublic.com/article/163941/dawn-everything-book-review-earliest-societies-anarchists) (while I find the evidence cited in that article to be quite interressting, I don't agree with all the conclusions they come to).
Community does not necessarily need violence towards outsiders. In fact, according to a lot of scientists, human societies were very peaceful for a very long time (https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/debate-continues-stone-age-people-were-peaceful-or-warlike-020303). So the claim, that war or racism is in our human nature is ridiculous.
Almost as if there were other authoritarian systems, that tried to protect the interests of their ruling classes before capitalism.
Apes are racist and wage war? That seems interesting, where can I learn more?
Almost as if every capitalist government is doing everything they can to strike down these attempts because if they became successful, they would make other systems look bad.
But also, the Zapatistas still exist and have existed since 1994, so we don't know yet, how long they will last. And yeah, it is really impressive to build an egalitarian, system with flat power structures amidst overwhelming resistance by governments with hugely powerful military force.
Kind of, but I was wondering if there more to it than just Marxist communism?
But wouldn't the same apply to you?
What? This is just pure misinformation. Marx was a notorious authoritarian. This isn't some secret either, he was very, very vocal about it. He went out of his way to criticize, mock, and demean the pacifist socialists of his era as being naive, stupid, and weak. Just look at criticisms of Pierre Joseph Proudhon or Charles Fourier or Henri de Saint Simon. He's literally famous for favoring violence over peaceful alternative in his works.
Communism was just his idea of a utopian society, it's not his ideology. Marx's ideology is about how he thought societies should get to this utopia of his. His ideology instructed that a society should overthrow capitalism in a revolution, workers should seize all property and means of production by force and kill all those who resist, and then establish a transitional socialist state that represents the workers that rules with an iron fist in order to bring about the social climate necessary to realize communism (dictatorship of the proletariat). Since communism is a utopia, it'll never be achieved, and that's why all the attempts at it in history have always stopped at the tyrannical transitional socialist state stage... the Soviet Union was such an example, Maoist China would be another.
So you're not an anarchist, but a Marxist? Anarchy as a philosophy is fundamentally opposed to the idea of using organized violence to coerce society into doing things that are against people's will.
I wasn't giving an opinion there. That's literally how civilization is defined:
"All civilizations have certain characteristics. These include: large population centers; monumental architecture and unique art styles; shared communication strategies; systems for administering territories; a complex division of labor; and the division of people into social and economic classes."
Source: National Geographic
Did you read the article that you linked? It doesn't make this claim. It's saying that we have new evidence of prehistoric wars, but it's still too limited and vague to determine the origin of warfare, because the interpretation of that means is also too vague. It doesn't say that humans were more peaceful or more warlike.
Humans, like all the other great apes, can be violent and can have physical fights between different tribes, and we did. Evidence for human on human violence is present in every era and everywhere. It just that it used to be that human communities were small and nomadic, and if they ran into people, they would just move to another area. The only times people fought was if a group was threatening another group or if there were scarce resources. However, around 10,000 years ago, we developed agriculture and people depended on the land they were on. Population and population density both increased due to the increased food production, which demanded more land and resources... and it's not hard to see why competition, and ultimately war, became more intense.
Yes, and Marxist socialism was no different. Instead of the elite being royalty and nobility or economic tycoons or the clergy, it became the rulers of the new socialist government. Every single Marxist attempt in history devolved into being a dictatorship of sorts where immense power was concentrated in the hands of a few who had all the say and no oversight who ended up wrecking havoc on society. This is actually one of the biggest reasons why Eastern European countries despise communism as much as fascism, and rightfully so.
I know you're being facetious, but what I said is factual. Obviously apes aren't racist, you just misinterpreted what I said. I said that humans, like the other great apes, are tribalistic. For us modern humans, that has manifested itself in the form of something like racism or whatever other type of bigotry. The point is that the underlying cause for it stems from evolutionary trait that we evolved in nature. The same goes for war. Great apes, specifically chimps, our closest relatives, do have wars of their own.
Again, I'm not babbling nonsense, this is something that's both well studied and well known. This research is literally what made Jane Goodall famous. She studied the Gombe chimps in Tanzania for 50 years, and she found that chimps are very similar in behavior to humans. They made and modified tools, the had complex social hierarchies, they had wars, they were tribalistic, they ate meat, they share bonds and emotions like people, and so on. You'll be surprised by how much of our behavior is actually evolved rather than conditioned. Human nature is very complex and runs very deep.
You can't blanket blame capitalism for everything, that's just lazy and dishonest. During the cold war, for example, the Soviet Union spent a comical amount of effort trying to take down capitalist societies. They committed genocides, overthrew democratically elected governments, started civil wars, invaded sovereign nations, installed puppet dictators, launched countless propaganda campaigns, and the list goes on and on. They were after all the other half of the cold war. Yet despite their efforts, which were on par with the US, they failed and capitalism came out on top. That didn't happen because of the CIA, it happened because capitalism just happens to be a better, more functional, and more resilient system than socialism. Accountability is often better than deflection.
In this case, Rojava was actually supported by Western capitalist democracies, and it got taken down by islamists backed by Turkey. The anarchists in Spain were on the side of the Republicans who were defeated by Franco and his fascist army, who were supported by fascist Germany and Italy, so there wasn't any notable capitalist society that opposed them. As for the Zapatistas, they were never sovereign, they're just a rebel group that hasn't really done much. Even the Mexican government doesn't care about them. You talk of a grand conspiracy against anarchist attempts by the big evil capitalist governments, but there really isn't any evidence to support that. They failed to achieve anything, they failed to sustain their movements, and they failed to defend themselves when it mattered.
But they didn't do this. The Mexican government controls all of the territory they claim, and Mexican law is the rule of the land. Do you have any actual evidence that they achieved this? More importantly, do you have any evidence that this led to anything tangible at all? As far as I'm aware, they only make grand claims, they haven't done much. They didn't build infrastructure, improve healthcare, raise the standards of living, advance science, build universities, decrease crime, they didn't gain sovereignty, or anything really. If anything they did the opposite. They opposed a train project by the government to connect them to the rest of the country in 2020. They dissolved the Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities because they couldn't get a handle crime in 2023. They seceded their claims to sovereignty by trying to participate in Mexican elections in 2018, only for their candidate to not be able to garner enough signatures to even show up on the ballot. This is impressive to you? Like come on, what are we even talking about?
I pasted this from your other comment for convenience. Based on your evasive wording, I think we both understand that fundamental flaw with the ideology here. Societies require order in order to keep the peace, however order can only be achieved with a certain degree of force (i.e. threat of punishment for breaking the law)... but that directly contradicts anarchism as a concept because anarchy is against order in general because its inherently hierarchal. So you can either have a functional society or you can have anarchy, not both.
Also the crime thing, what I meant about coming together as a community was assembling councils of people that have expertise in how to handle this, who decide together and enforcing the decisions not through state violence but through collective action by the community.
I was curious about what the site attached to the watermark was like: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-mind-unleashed/
Read that again. Slowly.
/r/im14andthisisdeep
When someone wants to be an edgy centrist but ends up enforcing leftism
The right in the US only says what their cult leader tells them to say. If he says the government is bad (which he often does when he's not the one running it), it's bad, but when he says it's good, (which he often does when he's the one running it) they say it's good.
Right, so the proper order of operations here is to get rid of the corrupt billionaires, so that we can clean up the corrupt government.
Corrupt billionaires was the problem when it was a monarchy. It was a problem when they were plantation owners. It was a problem when they were railroad barons. It was a problem when they were automotive industrialists.
During Hoover, even the US people, who were taught to be terrified of communism knew that what we had wasn't working. FDR pushed the New Deal through as a last bastion of western capitalism, and at that very moment, the ownership class started working to roll all that back.
Curiously, billionaires can't seem to remember the whole thing about the social contract, that to keep the working class from burning it all down, you have to make sure they are compensated enough to survive. They're not doing that, and eventually too many people are going to have a grudge and would rather no system than this system.
You become a billionaire by fucking over just enough people. Too many and they turn on you, too few and you have to settle for being a filthy multimillionaire. The entire job, as it were, of a billionaire is to go as far as you can without pissing off the wrong people. They didn't forget about the social contract, they're just confident that a little more won't hurt.
Edge cases of billionaires who genuinely innovated their way to the top aside (I can't think of any) I think going too far is just a feature of billionaires as a class.
Curiously, we live in an age in which billionaires are glad to broadcast every whimsical thought they have to the rest of the world. Tycoons of previous ages didn't have that capacity even when they wanted it, and the best they could do is hire a biographer.
But because of this, we are certain of how our billionaires today have gone mad with power, believe that somehow they've earned their lucre, and have total disregard of the well-being of the working class, even those whom they've hired and depend upon. They seem entirely oblivious to the possibility of revolt of the masses, or believe that robust surveillance and security will be enough to stop the onslaught. So, too, believed the French aristocracy in King Louis XVI's court.
Stark-raving-mad billionaires are not really a new phenomenon. Andrew Carnegie once got a chill when he realised that J. P. Morgan would totally shank him to take is assets if he could. Carnegie was only slightly less ruthless, himself.
This has created a dilemma for many of them since they want mercenaries and servants to support them in their apocalypse bunkers, but don't want to be at their mercy when suddenly the billionaire, himself, is no longer useful to the killers that he's hired. The only solution that has emerged from futurologists is maybe be nice to them so they don't turn on you. But rare is the billionaire who is capable of actually doing that.
Robots. The answer here is AI and robots.
Where's the robot to pat you on the back?
One can only hope.
I just read that the English government is considering a Law that forbids politicians to lie. I actually thought that was the whole starting point of politics but somewhere down the road clearly they must have noticed that no-one cared, so they finally made sure we'd care.
A lil disappointing on the progression charts of evolution, but hey! We now can move on.
We have truth-in-advertising laws, and political campaigns are nothing more than marketing/ promotional/ advertising campaigns, so those laws should apply. If someone is making claims that are demonstrably false, their campaign should be ended, and their entire campaign fund confiscated, and they should be prohibited from ever holding office again.
They'll learn real fast.
We really gotta stop using that girl in memes that make her seem crazy. She was the calmest most reasoned person in that video.
So billionaires are the problem?
Extreme wealth disparity is the problem. When people can get vastly more rich than everyone else, to the point they can buy entire governments, the system turns from democratic to autocratic.
It's been a recurring problem in the US for generations, especially since the temptation once a person is elected into federal office (or even high state office) is to forgo fixing the system in favor of getting rich from lobbyist bribes.
Everyone is "I need someone who I can vote for!"
Why not run yourself? I bet there is a considerable amount of people willing to vote for a random person who has no known connections to oligarchs, pedophiles or billionaires
Because I don't want to be a politician.
There are also too many stupid executives. That doesn't mean that I want to be an executive. I cannot both be a politician and an executive.
Because I'm not tough enough to handle the death threats I'd get for being trans.
I think that must be the most cold take anyone has ever had in the entire history of thinking. There were mollusks who already understood this. This isn't news to anyone.
Idk still seems like a majority of people still think if "their side" was in power it would fix everything.
In my country my side is in power and they're all useless. But it's still better than the alternative, at least we're not at war with Iran alongside the US and Israel. Which is what would have happened otherwise.
Everyone knows it's the rich and powerful who are in control it's why socialism is such an appealing idea, and why of course it will never happen.
So... Anyone up for Corrupt Socialism? It's not looking so bad these days, eh?
Pretty sure the Leftist there would agree
Corrupt billionaires controlling the government in a fight to hoover up every last penny of the entire population of the earth are a substantial problem.
The majority of the right doesn't actually care about corruption as long as they see it benefiting them, or hurting the 'other team'. It doesn't actually need to benefit them it can even hurt them substantially, as long as it hurts the other side more and they are told they could have an advantage due to it.
In the end, the left politicians are as into the corruption as the right, they're just better at lip service and nothing is going to change.
Way too much credit is being given to both sides of this. Everybody is just cheering for one team or another with their votes. Whatever they say aloud doesn't really matter because the result is handing over any choice or real practical discourse to a handful of people who are entirely at the mercy of their political parties and the party sponsors.
Choosing a lesser evil is always better than doing nothing but we really need more than two choices at this point. The massive PAC funding has to go and campaigns really need to have extremely strict regulation that is thus far unprecedented imo. We also truly need national ranked choice voting, strict term limits for all elected positions and honestly, age limits too.
Would be nice if we had more popular vote based levers as well to force certain policies or decisions, but the tyranny of the majority has some challenges too. Maybe congress and the courts should be expanded so that more people are involved in the representation of a country that had ~26 senators and ~65 representatives in 1791 when we only had around 4 million americans. We are close to 350 million people now which is 87.5x more than then, so shouldn't the have closer to ~2275 senators and ~5688 representatives? Would be a hell of a lot harder to keep this many people in lockstep with "loyal" party line voting like there is today in our completely fucked system especially with term limits that mean they don't have to worry about re-election (maybe it should be one term only, ever. Longer duration but the citizens of a district should be able to vote to trigger a new election cycle for what's remaining in a term.)
Oh and districts at this point probably shouldn't be based on drawn voting maps. Everybody's social security number should go into a pool and be randomly assigned to a district in every state that corresponds to the amount of representatives they have. The voting places could be the same local ones and the tallies could still be done, we'd just need a number of voting forms in each voting location that corresponds to each district based on the amount of voters. They could even print these out on demand on the day of to avoid waste if we want to avoid a digital solution.
anywho, feel free to dunk on all of it. These words don't even matter, this will never happen. The ones in power run the show and do not want to give up their power.
Not much to disagree with here. I like the thought of future governments that are written to resist corruption. I think you raise several good ways to do this. I think ultimately electing by popular vote has to go away in favor of a system that randomly elects from a qualified pool with term and age limits.
A government has to be designed to resist corruption instead of embracing it.
Soon there will be a critical mass of people who have nothing left to lose. In these times people instinctively, correctly, lash out at those who have the most.
Keep the masses busy with UFCs fights and fighting each other while getting away with raping babies. A playbook as old as history can remember.
Almost like they intentionally keep us divided
They don't really have to try anymore. Anyone who eats propaganda of one side wants nothing to do with the other.
good luck finding any
This leftist doesn't want capitalism or government.
When does the right think corrupt government is the problem?
They're too busy blaming everything on whatever that corrupt government tells them to.
Where shitpost?
Yeah. True.
Find a local politician that is working class and normal, then support them.
That only fixes a tiny fraction of the problem.
And yet next to no one even does this small step. There is no individual action that will magically fix it all.
My point is you're suggesting something that addresses even less than what the meme is saying.
Yes, many individual things will be necessary... and you cite one thing.
Supporting Politicians that aren't rich and aren't corrupt doesn't address the meme?
It addresses one aspect of a corrupt government, which is part of one of two main points brought up. It's also one aspect where you'll have to work through the corruption. It does nothing to address billionaires who, as others have already discussed by, would be pushing directly against such efforts.
Guess who's going to have more pull? You, or the billionaires that already have the government in their pocket?
We can debate all day about which step is first (it's all of them), but it's inarguable that simply hoping for a savior to come along and somehow magically win through a corrupt system isn't going to be the avenue to fix this mess.