This is actually an older news story, and it does appear as though she recovered from this before her death.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14389544
this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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Sort of the joke in Western countries. We took all the absolutely critical domestic infrastructure that we all agree needs to be funded and we all rely on to exist and passed it off to the most greedy sociopath assholes we could find.
Now we're shocked to discover that our planes crash and our retirement homes price gouge and our tech companies just do fake money scams to the tune of $2.5 trillion dollars. Our local sports teams are all run by a big casino. Our universities are all run by sports team owners. Our domestic energy companies keep getting pranked by the fake money scammers, while complaining that environmentalists just made the price of natural gas go vertical. And our health care system is six hedge funds in a set of doctor's scrubs.
But when push comes to shove, if you ask an American why this country seems to be circling the drain, the answer is some combination of "Woke Communist Joe Biden put transgenders in charge of the military industrial complex" and "Cheeto Mussolini Donald Trump gave Putin/Xi the sticky note with all our passwords on it, right after Barack Obama had fixed everything."
You'd never even know Blackrock Financial, Goldman Sachs, Citadel Advisors, and Berkshire Hathaway exist, much less why they have more control over the global economy than any two dozen elected officials you could name.
the real reason why american has gone down the shitter, ironically, is the existence of political parties. The parties ironically haven't done anything themselves, though they're trying to. It's the lack of action outside of the parties that's causing it.
If we weren't so fucking laser focused on calling people idiots for no reason, we'd have a productive and healthy society. But no the elites have their own class, and they give us this shitty fodder to play with while bored, and we just fucking eat it up like pigs in a feed trough.
political parties are symptomatic of voting systems. That is to say the number of political parties a place has depends on the kind of voting system it has.
yup
I don't know if I'm going to pin a failing economic model on the existence of organized political groups. That's a hair's breath shy of blaming poor economic policies on the existence of governments.
Its rarely for no reason. Mystifying the political process by asserting you have to be a Smartie to understand it is a method of Other-ing and alienating people from any kind of activism or intervention. Its a deliberate rhetorical technique intended to push people out of government.
We eat it up like pigs when the denouncement is aimed at the opposition. We recoil in offense when its aimed at us.
One of the big hopes of social media was to better organize and empower large groups of people by rapidly getting them up to speed on how political systems and effective interventions work. But Web2 and Web3 centralization of media, combined with a bunch of COINTELPRO style harassment of larger outside groups, has destroyed the foundations that local communities tried to build up in the 90s/00s.
This gets us back to big corporate interests simply owning everything. If you need to suck Elon's cock in order to get any kind of positive media exposure on Twitter, the only political organizers with any effective purchase are going to be the current batch of white nationalists and tech bro sychophants Elon loves. Same with Facebook/Instagram/Threads and Google search results and Microsoft's pet AI project ChatGPT.
If it looks like we're eating like pigs, it might be because all we're ever fed is slop.
let's have a think on it, why would the economic model be failing? Because it's profitable for the people with the money, and those in government. Why would the government be busy not preventing this? Why would companies be pushing for this? And why wouldn't the general public be pushing AGAINST this? Because we're too busy complaining about how trump deregulated the economy, making things harder, as well as the other side complaining about how joe biden fucked up the economy by [insert argument here]
exactly, and it's also why we keep fucking falling for it, because we're idiots that can't see the hook through the bait. You think the parties are productive when the vast majority of their time is spent on completely irrelevant shit? No, they're not. That's not why they do it, they do it because if they do, then they don't have to fucking do anything, because we'll all be preoccupied bombing abortion centers or churches or whatever the fuck we're supposed to be doing.
pretty much this exactly.
The capitalist economic model is failing because of the law of diminishing returns coming into contradiction with the demand for higher next quarter profits. Individual sectors of the economy with the most leverage can raise their rents, but only at the expense of other areas of the economy. So Boeing can sell shittier airplanes by purging its staff of skilled engineers, but this creates downturns in neighborhoods where those engineers live. And it also scares people away from flying commercial airlines.
This was immediately profitable for Boeing (10 years ago). But its been awful for Boeing right now. And even worse for a government that needs Boeing's airplanes to maintain both commercial and military aviation roles. Folks with money in Boeing stock also aren't thrilled with this turn.
Because government officials surrendered their role in manufacturing and regulating aircrafts to Boeing itself, on the theory that Boeing management would not behave shortsightedly. Oops!
Now the engineers who are blowing the whistle are showing up in court rooms (when they aren't killing themselves in the middle of a deposition) and government agencies are scrambling to figure out how to do jobs they haven't had to do in decades. But its a big ship and slow to turn.
We're blind men feeling at an elephant. Its a big problem and when one guy's got the tail and another's touching the tusk, it may not seem like the same thing to everyone.
That's not because we're all stupid. Its because the problem is big and the solution is hard. But the process to solving the problem requires teamwork. That's where Americans tend to suck hardest.
Because we all assume the other guy is stupid, I describe the tusk and you describe the tail, and we both accuse one another of not knowing what we're touching.
and squeezing as much money out the people of a community is useful to those who have the money to then buy up that community. Gentrification. This all inevitably leads to economic collapse being profitable to rich people, and those who enable them. I.E. corporations and the government.
probably also related to lobbying money, i'm almost certain that boeing lobbied for this, so that they could make more money, possibly even gave money directly to politicians. Boeing is probably in the middle of lobbying right now even.
it's probably because we allow corporations to lobby the government and decide shit for us instead of doing it ourselves. But that's another problem.
you're assuming that i'm calling anyone specifically stupid, i'm not. My point is literally that WE, us, me and you, are sitting here, yelling about the technicalities about the actual problems, which we both agree exist. Rather than simply doing something about it. I assume that's also your point however. In which case, stalemate?
Do you have any recommendations?
yeah idk, maybe get people to jointly hate the government, and how aggressively they overstep on our rights.
We just passed a funding bill for three different countries, two of which are actively at war. There's absolutely the possibility that we can do this but for basic economic shit.
Everybody hates tax, find a way that cleans it up such that both republicans and democrats like it. I've proposed moving income tax from the individual to the company, which means individuals no longer have to deal with income tax (though they still technically pay it) and that also makes it much easier for the IRS to go after income tax fraud.
The Nine Scariest Words In The English Language are "I'm from the government and I'm here to help".
~ Ronald Raygun
We passed a Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to the tune of $1.2T in federal spending less than three years ago. But the money is primarily focused on propping up private businesses friendly to the goals of the current administration.
If you want to live in a country that doesn't have any taxes, try North Korea. 😆
But the preponderance of wealth makes the tax burden very uneven. We also spend absurd amounts on a military that's proven itself ineffectual and unreliable and a transportation system that's expensive and wasteful. This while draining money away from education, health care, and pensions. We've practically zeroed out our spending on public housing.
Folks don't mind kicking in to make their communities grow. But I'm living on a street that hasn't been repaved in over 10 years, using utilities that haven't been upgraded in at least 20, and I'm being told my property taxes are going up because my house's market rate keeps climbing. Where is my money going? That's the thing that annoys me more than anything.
Sure, fine, cool. But where will it go? To my local school system? To some border prison for migrants? To the newest payload of a bomb detonated over Rafa?
notoriously right wing governmental figure, and actor with no political background*
that's a governmental problem, and also a corpo influence in government problem. I don't know what you want me to do about it. A lot of that funding went to critical infrastructure, roads, water utility, electric utility, internet, etc. A lot of those could be passing through private hands, but that's just the state of the market.
i mean yeah, you could also just not exist. That's also a solution to taxes, great blanket statement there.
i mean yeah, that would have been why i proposed pushing it onto corpos, They control most of the money flow anyway.
i mean yeah, that's fair. That's certainly a valid complaint, but don't come swining at me, go swinging at your local representatives.
it's the exact same, except that you don't fucking file it. Because the entity you work for does now. It's not like companies control where their taxes go, unless they commit tax fraud, which is a big no no.
You could always ask. I know that I'm not the usual American but I'd say that the reason (and reason why nothing of note has been done about it since neoliberalism set its hooks) is as simple as the increase in wealth disparity.
That's definitely a consequence of current policy, but it isn't the cause.
We have domestic policies and social structures that encourage wealth aggregation. And we have certain administrative heads that champion these policies.
If you want to get to the deepest of root causes, it's definitely anti-social mental illnesses exhibited by those seeking and holding power, leading them to be driven to gorge on more and more.
Any higher than that, I'd still argue that wealth/power/resource disparity is the cause of the vast majority of societal problems. From crime, to healthcare access, to homelessness, and invasive, privacy-violating tech. They all come back to one thing: people don't have enough resources, despite there being more than enough to do around. The disparity enables those with the lions' share of resources to leverage them to extract even more, in a cycle that we've been seeing since at least Reagan's union busting days.
That's more a survivorship bias. People with anti-social issues have an easier time maximizing the profitability of their financial ventures.
Its also why so much modern business has to happen in increasingly alienated fashion. Don't own a sweatshop, invest in one. Don't invest in a sweatshop, invest in H&M stock. Don't invest in H&M stock, invest in a textiles ETF. Don't invest in the textile industry, just give your money to a professional investment advisor. The farther away you get, the less the consequences of your actions will haunt you. The whole system is designed to hide the messy details from the people moving the money.
Also a big reason why we have a bunch of AgGag laws in big farming states. Can't let people who buy the meat see how the sausage is made.
Absolutely true. But even before Reagan, the old 1950s/60s union leadership was selling out its base in the name of American nationalism. Truman and then Eisenhower spent their respective terms empowering Hoover's FBI to purge all the Lefties from labor. Hollywood got its blacklists. Universities were purged of their Marxist professors. Shop floors had to denounce the IWW before they could win contracts with the more business-aligned AFL.
By the time Reagan started cracking knees at the FAA, the spine of the labor movement had already been broken.
I think that we're actual nearly in agreement. To clarify, when I say "anti-social mental illnesses", I don't necessarily mean Anti-Social Personality Disorder (not discounting it either but, it's likely more complex than just that and it's a topic that I am not aware of seeing much study because those afflicted are considered models of "success"). Rather, I mean that these individuals are exhibiting behaviors that are knowingly detrimental to the society and the human species for individual gain (most often gain that could be greater and more sustainable without anti-social behavior).
Also, please note that I'm not trying to say "mental illness" is the cause of all of the world's wrongs. Myself and just about everyone that I am close to have some form of mental illness and/or neurodivergence and I can guarantee that we're not the cause (nor have we heard of a secret society called The Stonecutters /s).
If you want to get really anthropological and take a long lens view, this is a process of speciation. Humans as accidental super-predators give rise to the Homo Capitalismi, an apex predator who annihilates the parent species in the same way humans annihilated millions of other species.
Fair enough. I've heard more than a few folks suggest the medicalization of the market mechanic, wherein we can have our free markets if we just get all the CEOs on enough mood altering chemicals. Glad you're not on that track.
A shame, really. Their music slaps.
That is an interesting and incredibly dystopic suggestion. Could make for excellent satirical fiction. For reality, definitely an awful thought. Should the hypothetical H. capitalismi be anything but an evolutionary dead end, either a "cross-species" caste system would be required (those at the top tend to make up for lack of tangible skills with money) or major leaps in technology necessary to realize transhumanist visions. Such technologies are, barring major leaps, are unlikely to be available within any current lifetimes.
Indeed. I also want to be extra clear due to "mental illness" being the latest favorite scapegoat for things like mass shootings. My thoughts are more that understanding better why some individuals act in such anti-social ways could lead to potential rehabilitation but, more importantly, equitable social organization that is more resilient in the face of such forces.