- cross-posted to:
- memes@slrpnk.net
- cross-posted to:
- memes@slrpnk.net
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The beginning step is convincing the poors to care more about “the economy” than their own lives.
They want the poor slaving away to keep raising corporate profits with a smile on their face.
It’s why it’s so concerning that Dems are doing it now too. They’re literally the only thing standing between us and fascism, the problem is they won’t stop jogging over to the fascists.
We need a party that actually fights the fascist, not just hang out on the other side of a velvet rope but still in the same club.
For them the problem with fascism is that it is poorly marketed, rather than it being abhorrent.
Do they have a problem with it?
From the last three elections that have featured trump, it seems like the DNC loves fascism because it lets them run terrible candidates that spent decades trying to get to be president.
It’s only worked 50% of the time, and a random candidate would easily win.
So to me, it looks like the DNC was just waiting for a reason to run less popular and less progressive candidates.
trump gives them an excuse to shout down anyone that wants to hold the DNC to any standard what so ever.
As I said, their problem isn’t that fascism is bad, it’s that they don’t like the word, or anything that looks like 1930s fascism. For them it’s a marketing problem that needs a marketing solution. How do we sell it to a country that hero-worships a generation that made war against it and first hand saw the evils it produced. Folk hate being called a fascist even if they fully support all the policies.
Lets put things this way:
- Neoliberalism wants that The State, which is led by people chosen by vote with the votes of everybody - rich or poor - counting the same (ish) to stop “regulating”, “interfering in the Market” and in general opposing the Power of Money. The Power of Money remember, is not at all equal for everybody, quite the contrary.
So essentially Neoliberalism, which is what the Liberals who control the DNC want, seeks to replace Democracy - were the greatest power is the one controlled by the vote - with Oligarchy, were the greatest power is that of Money.
Outside the moral arena, the only difference between Oligarchy and Fascism is that in the former the Pyramid of Power has the Moneyed at the top, then The State, then the riff-raff, whilst in the latter it’s The State, the Moneyed and then the riff-raff.
We see the games they play and it appals us. Unfortunately it’s the only game in town. To change the game, you’re not only fighting the DNC and RNC, but network effect and inertia. And some of us don’t have the luxury to risk it. Even if it leads to a better world.
And some of us don’t have the luxury to risk it. Even if it leads to a better world.
To bring it back full circle:
Poverty literally rewires our brains and makes us plan on very very short timescales.
Feeling like you don’t have the luxury to plan ahead is both parties playing on normal human thinking to take advantage of you.
They keep you poor, and you can’t see through their bullshit.
Nothing will ever be fixed if we’re always ignoring the long-term and just taking any crumbs were offered now.
We get the option of a shit sandwich or a single baloney sandwich a day.
Obviously the bologna is better, but it’s not enough to live off of, we’re just going to starve slower.
The only disagreement I have is with the rather sweeping statement:
They keep you poor, and you can’t see through their bullshit.
As it makes it seem that the poor are ignorant, gullible rubes. Lack of money ≠ lack of wisdom, or insight.
As it makes it seem that the poor are ignorant, gullible rubes.
Nope.
Lack of money ≠ lack of wisdom, or insight.
Lack of resources causes a focus on short term because it’s not safe enough to plan ahead because now is dangerous.
That’s not a comment on any individual, that’s not even a comment on every human. Every mammal is like that, and I’m pretty sure other animals as well like lizards, birds, fish, etc.
Being poor doesn’t mean you started off dumb, but it literally drops your IQ almost an entire standard deviation
In a 2013 study published in Science, researchers from the University of Warwick, Harvard, Princeton, and the University of British Columbia find that for poor individuals, working through a difficult financial problem produces a cognitive strain that’s equivalent to a 13-point deficit in IQ or a full night’s sleep lost. Similar cognitive deficits were observed in people who were under real-life financial stress. Theirs is one of multiple studies suggesting that poverty can harm cognition.
https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/how-poverty-changes-your-mind-set
That’s just how our brains work.
You might not like it, but don’t try and treat it as some opinion that I have that you can just argue away because you don’t like it.
The problem with this mindset is the ratchet effect.
If you see a fascist movement forming or a movement being coopted, you can’t just sit idly by, thats how you get fascism.
You have to fight it. You have to treat the real problems that cause people to become fascists, and show people that you can make a better world. Not by debating people in the market place of ideas, that’s a liberal pipe dream when fascists only use the rules as a bludgeon. But by actually building one inside the shell of the systems that are currently here.
The DNC is unwilling to fight fascists, and completely willing to allow people fighting it to get crushed by their authoritarian beliefs.
The DNC would rather give us moderates than a candidate that will bring people to the polls on the threat that the other one is a fascist
I take your point. However, fascists are not the only movement that can co-opt. I didn’t say the DNC has to remain as it is currently.
The enemy wants you to throw your hands up and declare the DNC a lost cause. Not all of them are external.
Be a royal pain in the ass, shout down the adversary, do sit ins, gum up caucuses and for heaven’s sake, throw out “servility politics”.
Popular Fascism isn’t called Fascism. Its called Patriotism, typically with a sneer towards the Fifth Columnists and Country Haters who would dare question the innate reasonableness and fairness of the domestic system.
Fascism is what happens in foreign countries. It Can’t Happen Here.
Gotta keep voting for progressives until it’s liberals vs progressives in the national election. Then we might start seeing some meaningful change.
This all the way. Make it so the Republicans of today are never close to winning again and then you can actually foster some splits within the Democrats.
As it sits today, the Republicans have such. Great shot at winning that the Democrats can’t post a super left-leaning candidate otherwise they’d get handily beaten.
Maybe America isn’t nearly as progressive as we think it is.
Meh. Define progressive.
People, the regular mud sitting kind, would absolutely love universal healthcare, guaranteed pay, personal freedoms, and more. But for them it’s just a Quality of Life improvement they want. It’s not for society it’s for them. Phrase it like that and you have mass agreement.
The people with actual power and influence and those that follow their every word. Yeah far less interested cause they already have those things for themselves and it might eat into their life they think to give it to others.
People are selfish. Very few forward thinking social caring. But people will agree on a good thing, we just can’t get it past the people with different motives.
Oh, it definitely isn’t. If the US was actually progressive, universal healthcare at a minimum would be in place, same with more workers’ rights, etc. Let’s just hope American doesn’t become full blown racist with a Trump victory.
You are describing a one party state. Kind of optimistic to assume that if you manage to hand all of the power to one organization, with no real opposition, that it won’t be corrupted (more than it already is).
That is by design, Gerrymandering will never let that happen. Republicans will Gerrymander votes for themselves and the dems will let them do it to keep things to the right. You can vote all you want, but the people in power will make sure your vote is worth less and less the further left the people vote.
If the gerrymandering is done most efficiently, the gerrymandered side only wins by a few percent. So if the historically non-voters come vote for the underdogs, they can flip those districts.
That’s why there was no red wave in 22, and why the fascists are trying as many other methods to disenfranchise voters they don’t want voting (no food or water in long lines created by reductions in polling places and their hours, purging voter rolls, mail in voting bans, etc).
thats very optimistic considering you are now at conservatives vs fascists in the national election.
No party is gonna defeat fascism. The state will not protect you. You want to fight fascists? Do it yourself. Direct action is your friend.
It’s such a laughably weak veil the rich pull over people’s eyes I’m surprised more folks don’t figure this out.
It’s sickening to watch the rich people play their game with no care in the world whilst the working families are struggling just to feed their themselves.
The guy in the US who leaked the tax records of the rich, including Donald Trump, just got convicted to 5 years in jail.
Charles Littlejohn is a hero
Judge Ana Reyes highlighted the gravity of the crime, saying multiple times that it amounted to an attack against the US and its legal foundation.
“What you did in attacking the sitting president of the United States was an attack on our constitutional democracy,” Reyes said. “We’re talking about someone who … pulled off the biggest heist in IRS history.”
The judge compared Littlejohn’s actions to those of the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack, noting that, “your actions were also a threat to our democracy.”
“It engenders the same fear that January 6 does,” Reyes added.
This is the kind of bullshit that was said about him.
Also wasn’t “the biggest heist in IRS history” some hackers who took advantage of their shitty website’s authentication mechanism to obtain 100,000 returns, and then fraudulently file 13,000 returns based on the ones they stole? Totaling something like $40m in stolen returns? Seems like that would be a bigger “heist” than exposing Trump’s shady tax shit.
(your comment got duplicated btw)
The thing is, much of the time they are aware, but they agree that “this is how it should be”. Hence the phrase temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Like, Musk has more (money) b/c he deserves more, whereas Biden had more (votes) b/c… well, don’t think about that!:-P Cognitive dissonance is a bitch, especially when fueled from religious extremism that replaces critical thinking (which the Judeo-Christian Bible itself in numerous places commands to be done, but again don’t think about that either) with knowledge from authority.
People have no idea what true wealth really is like, not even close.
I remember this one time I was living in a working class area of London whilst working as a freelance software developer in Investment Banking front-office, which means making systems for actual Traders and Analysts, the kind of people who get millions in bonuses every year.
So I’m waiting in line to pay at the local supermarket and some old lady dressed in a nouveau riche style (you know the kind: old lady that thinks she’s poshly dressed but instead just looks overdone) has a till openned just for her and somebody from the supermarket is helping her pack her shopping. A different old lady, behind me in the queue for another till, in manner and dress clearly working class, turns to me and says: “Look at her, she’s involved in the Council and is rich”.
Now, remember, I was working with people who got millions in bonuses to work or the trully rich. They weren’t rich, they were the employees of the rich.
So I turned to her and told her: “Madam, if she was rich she wouldn’t be shopping herself at the supermarket”.
I’ve also seen pretty similar things amongst the older members of my extended family in my homeland, all of which come from poor origins: one of my uncles saved maybe half a million euros over a lifetime of owning and working long hours at his familiy operated restaurant and he thinks he’s rich.
I suspect this kind of shit is incredibly common: all but a handful of people are so distance from the ultra-wealthy that they have no clue of just how far from them they are, and the result of that is that you have old people with a bit of savings and shop keepers who make a tiny bit more money than the average working-Joe, voting for policies that benefit billionaires.
Exactly.
People think they’re rich when they’ve won the lottery, and sure they are compared to the average person, but they’re just a fly on the wall in comparison to the ultra-wealthy.
I simply don’t believe one can become that wealthy by any honest means - you can’t work to get that wealthy, you can’t win to become that wealthy, hell there are plenty of entire countries with less money than some of the ultra-wealthy.
The fact that these people can play around with such an unimaginably absurd amount of wealth while so many more struggle, their wildest dreams but a fragment of a fragment of a fragment of what these people have, I find to be absurd.
What gets me is how those ultra-wealthy people keep telling us to raise taxes on themselves - like Warren Buffett, explaining how his cleaning lady pays more taxes than he does due to the top capital gains tax loophole. So it seems more the likes of millionaires who want to become billionaires than the latter themselves who keep pushing for lowering taxes on the wealthy. At some point, people just have enough and couldn’t even want more if they tried, but then there are those for whom money isn’t even the goal, and it becomes more “the game” that is played, as they work out their therapy issues using the economics of entire nations in the balance. Daddy, are you finally proud of me now?
Just deleted the duplicate, thanks for the heads up
But that’s it. That cognitive dissonance is just part of the veil, same as the meme above.
The poor folks who get absorbed by the veil think they’re a shoe-in to the rich, when they couldn’t be further away - they’d have better chances of being picked to go to space than becoming part of the ultra-wealthy.But I was also trying to convey: even if the poor person absolutely knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there is no possible way that they will ever in their lifetime or any alternative reality ever become rich - even then, they still would vote for the right of the wealthy to pay less taxes than they themselves do, both in relative and even in absolute terms.
They think the resulting system is more “fair” - like Bezos made Amazon, and that is “good”, right?, whereas what does poor little old me offer to society at large… and anyway surely they give a lot to charity and basically it’s better for me and mine to put all the money into their hands than to put it into mine own, bc they know better how it should be managed for the good of us all™.
Yeah, the people who flunked economics in college, or far more likely never went to college and never took an economics class in high school either, act to block literal PhD professors who have spent decades studying the thing, plus also were involved in making them in the first place, like Robert Reich the former United States Secretary of Labor under Clinton’s administration and who also served under Ford and Carter, founded the Economic Policy Institute, and teaches at Berkeley. But on the one hand you have people like him, while on the other you have the disgraced Bill O’Reilly, the disgraced Tucker Carlson, who was “just asking questions”, the disgraced Roger Ailes, and nowadays the likes of Joe Rogan. I forget, what degree does he have?
When brown-nosing, Don’t Look Up (the movie title). You might not like what you see.:-D
It’s such a laughably weak veil the rich pull over people’s eyes I’m surprised more folks don’t figure this out.
Its a layered veil. I’ve seen plenty of people take some mushy centrist “Yes, the system is broken but did you see what’s happening outside of the line?! Its much worse!!!” position.
Also, lots of “I just want people to Obey The Line” rhetoric that precludes any kind of conversation about where Mr. Moneybags got the stick that draws the line from.
And of course, if you question the line or challenge the guy with all the money, you’re shoved to the other side and accused of being a foreign agent.
Proles will need to sacrifice everything to prosecute those who commit wealth crimes.
Fear begins to vanish when we realise
That countries are just lines
Drawn in the sand with a stickEnter Shikari - …Meltdown
And similarly, from Tool’s “Right In Two”:
Monkey killing monkey killing monkey over
pieces of the ground
Silly monkeys
Give them thumbs, they make a club
to beat their brother down
How they’ve survived so misguided is a mystery
Repugnant is a creature who would squander the ability
to lift an eye to heaven, conscious of his fleeting time hereOr Outernational’s “Fighting Song:”
Look down at our planet from the heavens above
See it as it is, see it as it is
No borders or banks, no wars or tanks
No nations! No nations!
Missing the fourth panel, where Moneybags shoves one of the workers over the line and announces “They hate you for your success!”, while the rest of the crowd stabs the outsider with pitchforks.
Cartoon could use a “priest” as well. Spouting Prosperity Gospel to keep the rubes in line. “My friend is rich because God has chosen him to BE rich, so his wealth is proof of God’s favor!”
And telling all the poor people how much of a sin their envy and greed is, of course!
deleted by creator
Phase 4: “Build a wall over that line or the outsiders will come and take your wall building job.”
Oh no they won’t! This is my damn mud puddle!
Biden told me the economy is doing super duper well right now
“The economy” only refers to the rich and their wealth inside the castle, not at all to you or I sitting in the mud.
The economy could be absolutely booming and simultaneously the majority of the working class could be unemployed/underpaid/in debt/starving/etc. Which is exactly what is going on right now.
Yeah. I wonder if he knows how much smaller the group of people that see themselves “in the economy” is.
They are the people that will pay him so he might not notice or care but the people being helped by a stagnant ok economy doing business as usual is getting smaller by the year.
Wait till all the AI robits take er jerbs. The only thing that may make that stop is the fact that all the consumers will have starved to death. But, they will find some way to plug that gap and keep going.
“The economy” these days is just a nickname for the rich man’s game - the stocks, shares, and speculation that have nothing to do with the average person’s lived experience.
The average person could be near-destitute, but because the rich man’s numbers are going up, tHe EcOnOmY iS dOiNg JuSt FiNe!
At least it’s not completely shut down like it was under your boy Trump’s presidency.
your boy Trump
shoves guy over the line
“He’s an evil foreign invader! Get him, gang!”
That’s like the difference between getting two slices of shit in your shit-sandwich or just getting one.
We got tax breaks for the rich and a handout to business owners while the rest of us got a couple extra paychecks for all that time things were shut down. This was all because we had our pandemic response plan killed by Trump because Obama had put it together. We also didn’t bother taking a hard stance on border crossings like New Zealand did early in the pandemic even in easy areas to do it like Hawaii.
The Covid pandemic response was 100% on Trump and his buddies.
I was in Finance at the time of the 2008 Crash and keenly watched the response to it from around the World, including Barack Obama.
If you think the handouts for the rich started with Trump, I have a bridge to sell you.
So you’re saying, hypothetical socialist nations would be justified being nationalist? Perhaps we should call it national socialism 🤔
Pure bait.
Obviously, but judging from the downvotes nobody enjoys political shitposting in a political memes community…
Well, the most well known of all national socialists, were not nationalists (they most definitelly weren’t for all of the nation, and claimed to be for a specific race) and even less socialists.
Seems to be a general rule that party names are complete total bollocks: does anybody trully believes that the Democrats want that everybody, rich and poor, has the same amount of control over the future of their country?
My guy I was not serious, I am both German and leftist, i am well aware of what national socialism is. I suppose I should have been more obvious. Good of you to try to educate though
