#the government for the ultra rich and by the ultra rich

[pinene]

The USA is on the brink of complete cultural disintegration. It has been rotting for years now. Nobody knows their neighbors because they know they’ll probably need to move soon anyways. Many people can’t read and most just refuse to. Those with remaining patriotism essentially take pride in their own exploitation. Those without it are aimless and afraid because this machine demands blind faith.

I guess this is the way of all colonial projects and empires. But to me there’s something uniquely hollow and creepy about this one—the US commits genocide on the people who had lived on the land for generations, constantly incentivizes people to move closer and closer to its bloating border. offers people from other countries the chance to be part of the splendor of the imperial core if they just come here and deal with awful conditions quietly, they can hope to have children who will hate speaking their native language, American children. And their children could be millionaires. Just keep working, keep your head down. When the rich get richer that just means our future’s brighter.

If we are to suppose the American dream was once achievable, it certainly isn’t anymore. There’s bipartisan acknowledgement of this, and partisan explanations and solutions. But they always neglect the fact that the American dream isn’t sustainable under capitalism lol like, after a few generations, everyone would be pretty well off if all it took was hard work. But if everyone was well off, then some people couldn’t be ultra rich, and a few couldn’t be richer than god. Wealth has to grow, profit has to increase, or it all falls apart. The money is trickling upward and pooling around the rich, and most of the country is still operating under the impression that this is a good thing.

not to mention how racism and intolerance get worse when the economy does, how moral panics sooth financial anxieties. the rich and the money-seeking have so clearly bait n switched us. valorizing wealth leads us to blame anyone but the rich, blame anything but class. and now it’s reaching a point of further consolidation and openly squeezing more and more out of the 99%. They don’t have to even pretend anymore because most people are fine with it. tv shows about the wealthy are really popular. We are such an aimless people, prideful and tribal about the square borders of ruined land we live in, proud to suffer for the chance to get to give the bank and the government most of your paycheck to live somewhere and almost own a big car to traverse the emptiness. Angry that it’s all so hard, but forbidden to blame the system. Bleh

[nando161mando]

Union busting = more money for the ultra-wealthy.

[the-potus-is-a-russian-asset]

[wahbegan]

Something something Batman is a billionaire fascist discourse ignores the fact that Batman has his roots in the hardboiled detective story, which thematically was written at a time when trust in the police was at a catastrophic low and as such mainly deals with private detectives kinda extralegally cracking cases that the cops are either not solving or actively obstructing and his conflict with the police has remained a fairly consistent point in most of his stories outside the Golden Age of Comics, Commissioner Gordon is the exception not the rule something something

[drawlfoy]

as a leftist i’ve never been an accelerationalist or really a revolutionary in any capacity since i don’t want to see the suffering and pain brought on upon by civil unrest and revolution but like. i don’t really see a reformist way out of the political mess that we’re in anymore. midterms sure and 2028, but the amount of damage being done is irreversible. its too little too late and there is no one left to hold those in power accountable

[contentvortex]

Not only do I not care if the vast majority of the submarine fuckos make it I'm actually getting more and more pissed off the more I read.

They chose to step into a tiny metal tube piloted by an off brand ps2 controller, and then descend to levels that would make rescue nearly impossible if not objectively impossible. Now that the "this shit is going to fuck up" machine has fucked up they're scrambling governments and likely spending millions of dollars of tax payer money to rescue them, when a fraction of that would have stopped the incident from happening in the first place. When the regulations that were ignored could have prevented this.

I do not have sympathy for a Mt. Everest climber that dresses in shorts, a t-shirt, and bought his climbing gear off wish who (who could have seen this coming?!) needs rescuing. Not only do I not have sympathy but I'm pissed off at their recklessness and the immense impacts that their dumb actions are having on others.

My only sympathy for any of the 5 is with the 19 year old, because at that age you're gonna trust your dad wouldn't put you in an inescapable deathtrap.

[ramblesandrambling]

Millionaires: We are willing to pay bit! Remember that there are actual billionaires out there and that the difference is astronomical.

What’s the current political situation in the uk right now our millionaires are asking for a wealth tax while our two main parties reject it

[dallasoverdueessay]

love being a permanent resident in the united states right now /s

[chongoblog]

Being in America is super fun because you get to see Trump going up against Biden in a presidential election with both of them being dogshit options, mass protests against what should very obviously be seen as an injustice that spits in the face of what you were told your country stands for, except the government disagrees, using the power of the militarized state to brutalize protestors, all the while people spread malicious lies regularly with millions believing their every word(a lot of it being thanks to some rich freak on Twitter). Also, the economy is doing pretty damn poor and you see media sources tell you to sacrifice your well-being all while the ultra rich get richer and richer.

And then after you're done with 2020, you get to do it again four years later

[eugenedebs1920]

If one were to count to a million, one number per second, it would take, 11 days, 13 hours, 46 minutes and 40 seconds, that is if you continuously count all 11 and half days without rest.

If one were to count to a billion, one number per second, it would take 31.7 years, if you were to count 24 hours a day. Yet if you were undertaking this you’d need to sleep occasionally. If you were to count 16 hours a day, leaving room to sleep, it would take you roughly 48 years.

There’s a thousand millions in a billion, a million millions in a trillion, a thousand billions in a trillion.

There was a point in time where both Bezzos and musk net worth was nearly a trillion dollars. If they wanted to count just one billion of those dollars by hand it would take them 48 years to accomplish.

Elon musk makes $8 million a day from government subsidies, this is prior to him eliminating any competitors from the inside with doge. The average senior, who busted their butts for 50 years paying into their social security, Medicare, state and federal taxes, makes $65 a day.

The absurdity of it all is staggering. That these men who found their niche in business, bezzos with an online bookstore, right as the internet was taking off, and musk who’s father exploited black South Africans in his jewel mines, gave Elon the capital to invest in PayPal, to which he sold, bought an existing electric car company, used the carbon credits, and federal incentives, to make hundreds of billions of dollars, both pay the bare minimum in taxes, with Tesla paying nothing 3 out of the last 5 years. You and I, people who sometimes have to scrounge change to put gas in the tank, who struggle to pay for housing, groceries, insurance, try to enjoy life, we pay almost 40% of our income to taxes, social security and Medicare/medicaid.

How the f*ck is that acceptable!? Let alone celebrated?! You think these ultra rich know what it’s like to have to make decisions on whether hey can afford lunch or if that needs to go into the gas tank to get to work to pay to live?! WTF?!

Greed, selfishness, arrogance, these are the fuel that feeds the fire that leaves the middle class stuck, struggling and frustrated. But they have convinced so many that it’s the political opposition that is the cause of their inability to get ahead, or immigrants, of people of color, or trans people, gay people, stoking division to continue hoarding wealth like some sick addiction.

There’s not an infinite amount of capital in the U.S. economy. There’s only X amount. If these greedy robber barons stockpile the majority of it, that leaves a minuscule amount for the rest.

24 hours a day counting one number per second, it would take 32 years to count 1/200 of Bezzos and musk’s fortune.

TAX THE RICH!!!!

[theladyaokay]

Empathy challenge: impossible - Generate more media coverage expressions of sympathy for the 100+ children who drowned in the Mediterranean boat disaster recently than the singular 19 year old whose father was wealthy enough to buy all ~600 victims of that catastrophe a seat spot on the disaster sub and still be a billionaire. Philanthropy is easy when you're the one who has all the stuff.

And don't even get me started on the "quintessential British explorer" codswallop. He was a spoilt tourist. The two quintessentially British things he did are spaffing a load of money on self aggrandising nonsense, and fucking dying in a place he had no good reason to be.

There is also some real irony in experts on a maritime disaster not noticing any signs of their own pending maritime disaster.

As a final also on empathy and irony, I am aware that I am shitting on human suffering right after chastising the media for largely ignoring the much greater example of human suffering. This is on purpose. We collectively need to normalise hostility and antagonism towards the ultra-wealthy. Scorn them, mock them, laugh at their tragedy and their pain. Make them the only truly acceptable target.

Revive that brutally dehumanising old "joke": what do you call 5 multi-millionaires at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.

This whole thing is a fucking farce.

[the-potus-is-a-russian-asset]

[enemymine2000]

Time to do the thing, USAmericans: The bill claims to want to protect children from the dangers of the internet (pornography - but remember that's how the book bans started too, they will classify anything pornography that doesn't fit their narrow view of the world, like LGBTQIA+ or interracial content). But by doing so, it will force sites to implement surveillance tech. So imagine, down the line, AO3 with some kind of age verification and tracking system. Only if you're 18 or older you can enter the site or see certain contents. A tracking system records what you read, when you read it. Yeah, that pretty much would kill that site. Even true porn sites - don't you think, that some things are not a matter for the government to rule over? Shouldn't it remain in the purview of parents and guardians? To explain, to regulate, to educate? (But then the parents in the USA are kept so busy being worker bees for the ultra rich, how could they do that, when they barely have time to sleep? - Maybe everything is a class issue at the end of the day and your system needs an overhaul.) The bill even mentions that under Section 2 point 4, but in like a "the parents are not doing enough blocking"-way. So, yeah, do your thing with the calling and texting and mailing your reps and stuff. (And get yourself a VPN with servers outside of the 14 eyes countries, so they can't subpoena data.)

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Sigal Samuel at Vox:

There’s a dominant narrative in the media about why tech billionaires are sucking up to Donald Trump: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, all of whom have descended on the nation’s capital for the presidential inauguration, either happily support or have largely acquiesced to Trump because they think he’ll offer lower taxes and friendlier regulations. In other words, it’s just about protecting their own selfish business interests. That narrative is not exactly wrong — Trump has in fact promised massive tax cuts for billionaires — but it leaves out the deeper, darker forces at work here. For the tech bros — or as some say, the broligarchs — this is about much more than just maintaining and growing their riches. It’s about ideology. An ideology inspired by science fiction and fantasy. An ideology that says they are supermen, and supermen should not be subject to rules, because they’re doing something incredibly important: remaking the world in their image. It’s this ideology that makes MAGA a godsend for the broligarchs, who include Musk, Zuck, and Bezos as well as the venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. That’s because MAGA is all about granting unchecked power to the powerful. “It’s a sense of complete impunity — including impunity to the laws of nature,” Brooke Harrington, a professor of economic sociology at Dartmouth College who studies the behavior of the ultra-rich, told me. “They reject constraint in all of its forms.” As Harrington has noted, Trump is the perfect avatar for that worldview. He’s a man who incited an attempted coup, who got convicted on 34 felony counts and still won reelection, who notoriously said in reference to sexual assault, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” So, what is the “anything” that the broligarchs want to do? To understand their vision, we need to realize that their philosophy goes well beyond simple libertarianism. It’s not just that they want a government that won’t tread on them. They want absolutely zero limits on their power. Not those dictated by democratic governments, by financial systems, or by facts. Not even those dictated by death.

The broligarchs’ vision: Science fiction, transhumanism, and immortality

The broligarchs are not a monolith — their politics differ somewhat, and they’ve sometimes been at odds with each other. Remember when Zuck and Musk said they were going to fight each other in a cage match? But here’s something the broligarchs have in common: a passionate love for science fiction and fantasy that has shaped their vision for the future of humanity — and their own roles as its would-be saviors. Zuckerberg’s quest to build the Metaverse, a virtual reality so immersive and compelling that people would want to strap on bulky goggles to interact with each other, is seemingly inspired by the sci-fi author Neal Stephenson. It was actually Stephenson who coined the term “metaverse” in his novel Snow Crash, where characters spend a lot of time interacting in a virtual world of that name. Zuckerberg seems not to have noticed that the book is depicting a dystopia; instead of viewing it as a warning, he’s viewing it as an instruction manual.

Jeff Bezos is inspired by Star Trek, which led him to found a commercial spaceflight venture called Blue Origin, and The High Frontier by physics professor Gerard K. O’Neill, which informs his plan for space colonization (it involves millions of people living in cylindrical tubes). Bezos attended O’Neill’s seminars as an undergraduate at Princeton. Musk, who wants to colonize Mars to “save” humanity from a dying planet, is inspired by one of the masters of American sci-fi, Isaac Asimov. In his Foundation series, Asimov wrote about a hero who must prevent humanity from being thrown into a long dark age after a massive galactic empire collapses. “The lesson I drew from that is you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one,” Musk said. And Andreessen, an early web browser developer who now pushes for aggressive progress in AI with very little regulation, is inspired by superhero stories, writing in his 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” that we should become “technological supermen” whose “Hero’s Journey” involves “conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community.” All of these men see themselves as the heroes or protagonists in their own sci-fi saga. And a key part of being a “technological superman” — or übermensch, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say — is that you’re above the law. Common-sense morality doesn’t apply to you because you’re a superior being on a superior mission. Thiel, it should be noted, is a big Nietzsche fan, though his is an extremely selective reading of the philosopher’s work.

[...]

The broligarchs — because they are in 21st-century Silicon Valley and not 19th-century Germany — have updated and melded this idea with transhumanism, the idea that we can and should use technology to alter human biology and proactively evolve our species.

Transhumanism spread in the mid-1900s thanks to its main popularizer, Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist and president of the British Eugenics Society. Huxley influenced the contemporary futurist Ray Kurzweil, who predicted that we’re approaching a time when human intelligence can merge with machine intelligence, becoming unbelievably powerful. “The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problems … and will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a postbiological future,” Kurzweil wrote in 1999. Kurzweil, in turn, has influenced Silicon Valley heavyweights like Musk, whose company Neuralink explicitly aims at merging human and machine intelligence. For many transhumanists, part of what it means to transcend our human condition is transcending death. And so you find that the broligarchs are very interested in longevity research. Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Thiel have all reportedly invested in startups that are trying to make it possible to live forever. That makes perfect sense when you consider that death currently imposes a limit on us all, and the goal of the broligarchs is to have zero limits.

Vox has an insightful article on the disastrous vision that broligarchs like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg subscribe to.

[transfemme-shelterdog]

Hello! Local fascism expert here, and I'm gonna be talking about a common transandrophobic theme that I see a lot, and how it's actually a sign of fascism!

I'd like to introduce you to the philosopher/medievalist/social commentator Umberto Eco. He grew up in Fascist Italy under Mussolini, the OG Fascist (he literally invented the term).

Eco wrote an essay titled "Ur-Fascism" which has a list of 14 "criteria" or "features" that you'll see in fascist regimes

You can find a translated copy of this book here (as the original was in Italian)

I'd like to point you to point 8, pasted here for your ease of reading:

The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

An element of fascism is painting those you see as the "enemy" or "inferiors" (here, Jewish people) as both "ultra powerful", and "weak" at the same time. Another modern example is what Americans saw with Trump painting Biden as this ultra powerful, scheming mastermind who rigged elections in his favor, as well as a senile old fart who can't tell his hands from his feet. Strong... but weak.

Now, what other group of people are painted as both these ultra powerful monsters who hold power, privilege, and are sexual and violent predators, while also being weak, pathetic, little softbois who contribute nothing to the world?

Time and time again, you see trans men and transmascs painted as evil predators who are a threat, while also being "weak, frail, ex-women". This is legitimate fascist rhetoric, and I'm surprised that nobody else has picked up on the direct link between this contradiction and the emerging threat (or existing threat) of fascism that we see every single day.

Hell, there's a few other traits in that essay that fit their rhetoric as well, but I wanted to keep this post focused on the most commonly seen one.

So, yeah, TMA/TME users really are only one step away from being fascists (if anything, they're fascism enablers), and they need to realize this before it's too late.

[daughter-of-sapph0]

two possible outcomes to musk being the department of government efficiency or whatever

1) it's the equivalent of handing your little brother an unplugged gamecube controller so he thinks he's playing, when in reality musk will have no real power

2) and what's more likely, we're gonna have the worst economic collapse in us history and the ultra rich will face absolutely zero consequences