drthunder

I wonder what the mildest thing a true AI could tell the oligarchs to do that would make them shut it down. Giving 10% of their wealth away and not in a tax dodge way? Stop funding fascists?

Not to be confused with Times Square

On top of what everyone else has said, I’m gonna be that person and bring up capitalism, which I’m defining as private ownership of business (as opposed to state ownership, or ownership by the workers, etc). Capitalism concentrates money, and by extension power, which is never good for people without it. I’ll admit I’m biased as a socialist, but at this point the biggest indictment of capitalism for me is that most of what we’re seeing these days isn’t new: rampant wealth inequality which leads to institutions decaying, followed by liberal and conservative elites being either unable or unwilling to fix problems that are plain for everyone to see, followed by people being radicalized.

The new thing is global warming, which can’t be attributed solely to capitalism but is being exacerbated by it. A handful of people who get their money and power from fossil fuels would rather burn the world to ashes than give up that money and power (yes, they’re probably investing in renewables, but if they treated global warming like the existential threat it is, they wouldn’t be bankrolling climate deniers.

(this should not be interpreted as an endorsement of the Soviet Union or the current Chinese government, they are/were both also results of capitalism failing but neither of those is relevant to democracy failing in the West™ also I’m not a tankie, authoritarianism of every stripe is bad)

Having an idea of the government we want to have before shit goes down is a great idea. I’ve thought about writing down my thoughts for what a better government would look like and maybe I should do that. I’m sure none of us randos on Lemmy would be the people in the room where it’s happening, but if we talk about it maybe we can influence it.

I saw a take a few months ago that voting third party isn’t voting your conscience, voting your conscience is going against what you really want to do, to do what will actually result in the least harm happening. Our system of government is absolute trash but until it changes (and we should all be pushing for it to change) this is what we’ve got.

If you like the aggressive energy of that song, other ones like that are WWIII; Bullets, Bombs, and Bigotry; Paradise; and KMF. They have a shitload of music but that’s what I can think of off the top of my head.

Here are my thoughts:

• Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza since day 1, they just pick up the pace sometimes
• Every US president this century has enabled this
• Biden and Harris were all on board with the current round of fast genocide and they should be remembered for it
• Trump pretends to be anti-war but emboldened this shit by moving the US embassy to Jerusalem in 2018 or 19
• Netanyahu wanted Trump to win, as evidenced by meeting him during the campaign last year
• Any ceasefire supposedly happening right now is entirely to give Trump good press. He’s going to give Israel even more support for their imperialist bullshit than Biden did and Harris would have
• Because Trump won, the federal government is going after immigrants, nonwhite people, LGBT people, etc, and is going to further tear the good parts of the government down

I’m pretty disillusioned with the Democrats between the imperialism and almost completely giving in to the fascist takeover, but I wouldn’t be looking to get out of the country if Harris had won, so thanks for that if you could have voted and didn’t.

edit: I voted Uncommitted in the primary, helped out at my local Gaza camp, and have gone to rallies and distributed books about Palestine, so I’m not just sitting here at my computer saying all this

I haven’t experienced it lately, but sometimes when I watch too many YTPs I start getting fascist shit in my recommendations.

It really does. And I do think it was on the Brutal Legend soundtrack. I know it because I’m just old enough to remember that sort of stuff back in the 90s when it was big.

I’ve known about KMFDM for a long time but discovered Free Your Hate about this time in 2017, it’s too bad it’s that relevant again but at least we’ve got some good Nazi-punching music.

The ruling class was able to get along well enough up until the US Civil War, at which point the slavers decided they were willing to tear the country apart to keep on slaving. I include this because the Nazis were inspired by Jim Crow and how we did things over here. Fascism started bubbling up in the early 20th century because industrialization and capitalism polluted everything and made people work awful hours and all that, and liberalism and conservatism hadn’t fixed it. There was a serious coup attempt forming in the early 30s called the Business Plot, but they went to a war hero Marine general who told them to fuck off and told the federal government about it.

At least in the US, we’re in this situation now because authoritarians have been working toward it since the 60s (the Powell Memo was written in 1971 I think) and they’ve taken advantage of how terribly the Constitution is written, along with consolidation of wealth and stoking backlash to all the civil rights movements to get people to back them. The worst part is that it’s a feedback loop: since Reagan took power, Republicans campaign on “look how bad the government is!” and make the government worse once they’re in office, which feeds their cause.

tl;dr capitalism makes living conditions terrible, people abandon liberalism and conservatism for socialism/communism/etc and fascism, liberals don’t want much to change, fascism lives or dies based on how much conservatives sell out to/ally with them. The fact that we’re doing this all again shows to me that liberalism is a dead ideology and capitalism is going to kill us if we don’t kill it first.

There were real big sexual assault problems in the Mavericks organization while Mark Cuban owned the team.

Making ByteDance sell 80% to US companies is a win for the powers that be because then that too can be manipulated by right-wing oligarchs.

I don’t trust Chinese companies all that much either, but Mitt Romney outright said this was about Palestine, you can see another reply of mine below with a link.

I don’t trust either of them, but why would they lie about wanting to suppress support for Palestine? And if you don’t believe me, the State Department has them on record saying as much: https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-at-mccain-institutes-2024-sedona-forum-keynote-conversation-with-senator-mitt-romney/

SENATOR ROMNEY: A small parenthetical point, which is some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts. So I’d note that’s of real interest, and the President will get the chance to make action in that regard.

Facebook and YouTube have for years boosted conservative people and posts/videos: this is fine according to the powers that be.

Russia and no doubt countless others run influence operations through all US social media companies: this is also fine according to the powers that be.

China probably runs influence operations through a Chinese social media company: this is a national security problem that needs to be dealt with!!

The reasons TikTok is maybe being banned are because it’s the only major social media that isn’t suppressing pro-Palestine speech and because it’s not owned by a right-wing US oligarch. Musk is the shadow president, Zuckerberg is blatantly sucking up to Trump, etc etc.

I wish people knew that TikTok being banned was more about it not suppressing posts about Palestine than national security or whatever else they say. Antony Blinken and Mitt Romney outright said last year it was about stopping people from seeing the truth about Israel committing genocide. If the government actually cared about foreign influence operations they’d regulate data privacy and social media algorithms in some way (idk how, but I’m sure you could) but they obviously won’t because US companies manipulating people and stealing their data is totally fine.