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Northern Ireland27202 Posts
On July 10 2026 10:27 Razyda wrote:Show nested quote +On July 10 2026 07:27 WombaT wrote:
Can’t remember who said it, although it has Kwark vibes, but if some monkey just sat around bossing its peers around, and hoarded all the bananas, the other monkeys would probably end up beating it to death before long. It may be first time when i see someone aspiring to be a monkey...  Show nested quote +On July 08 2026 15:50 Fleetfeet wrote:On July 08 2026 11:36 WombaT wrote:On July 08 2026 10:43 dyhb wrote:On July 08 2026 10:33 WombaT wrote:On July 08 2026 10:00 dyhb wrote:On July 08 2026 09:41 Billyboy wrote:On July 08 2026 09:37 dyhb wrote:On July 08 2026 09:27 Billyboy wrote:On July 08 2026 09:15 dyhb wrote:
[quote][quote]I swear that you all are trying to get pre-mad that an election win wasn't big enough to change everything, instantly, like in a Hollywood movie. The country will still be heavily divided, and that shit predates Trump and will continue after Trump. Accept a narrow victory and focus on stacking the gains 2026->2028. Softcore assassination porn and weird fantasying about avoiding Democracy when you don't like the results is not the way.
Your heart's in the right place, but your head is not. Odd strawman from my post arguing against him dying in a video game. I did say softcore porn. Hardcore porn would be saying you think Donald Trump should be assassinated prior to leaving office. Actually, transitioning from a video game to a Hollywood drama about the perfect election victory has a narrative rhyme that I missed the first time around. GH is doing what you said, he’s setting up to quote the posts of Sim and Jan, and claim they need to join his revolution or something. The rest of us are just mixing hope and despair. Small election wins in subsequent elections are the kind of progress we need and can use, and big wins are possible if Iran keeps going the way its going and the tariffs keep killing the economy. I think the morose attitude on what a small win will say about America is puerile. On July 08 2026 09:50 WombaT wrote:On July 08 2026 09:37 dyhb wrote:On July 08 2026 09:27 Billyboy wrote:On July 08 2026 09:15 dyhb wrote:
[quote][quote]I swear that you all are trying to get pre-mad that an election win wasn't big enough to change everything, instantly, like in a Hollywood movie. The country will still be heavily divided, and that shit predates Trump and will continue after Trump. Accept a narrow victory and focus on stacking the gains 2026->2028. Softcore assassination porn and weird fantasying about avoiding Democracy when you don't like the results is not the way.
Your heart's in the right place, but your head is not. Odd strawman from my post arguing against him dying in a video game. I did say softcore porn. Hardcore porn would be saying you think Donald Trump should be assassinated prior to leaving office. Actually, transitioning from a video game to a Hollywood drama about the perfect election victory has a narrative rhyme that I missed the first time around. Nonetheless I’m pretty sure Billyboy nor Simberto expressed no such assassination sentiment, so it feels odd to me to throw it out in a direct reply to them. I’ve no such compunctions and I’ll admit to that, the sooner the cunt is out of office the better. Given there are seemingly no limits to what his own party will tolerate, and he’s clearly not going to face censure for his many crimes, death is quite the equaliser, something no person can escape. Would prefer natural causes or a hilarious accident than assassination, which I don’t support. The softcore assassination porn was more directed at you and simberto ("A much better scenario than assassination in minecraft" as an evaluation of degree). To Billy, it appears that his problem with assassination is martyrdom, not assassination. I wholly reject that, I’m in the hardcore assassination porn camp, give me some credit. I don’t think that’s accurate based on Billy’s general posting and what I’ve gleamed from his musing in general. He’s free to speak for himself of course, but contextually I took him to mean ‘assassination is bad, and there may be a martyr effect’, not ‘assassination is bad because there’s a martyr effect’. And to follow your earlier billionaire logic, not sure why it’s bad really. I think the death of a person would be of a benefit for wider society, what’s the problem? If you support any domestic policy or foreign intervention that so much as kills 2 people well, you’re twice as bad as me right off the block. Because you're not the only one on the block with ideas on who in society we should kill in order to make society better off. Perhaps not but my ideas are actually good ones. Facetiousness aside maybe Republicans should have backed impeachment, as they should have if they had any gumption. Instead we’re locked into 4 years of absolutely blatant corruption, with a man who has already skirted his just desserts actively stacking institutions in his favour So I mean you can’t get rid of him via legitimate means, that ain’t happening. So it’s either health issue, assassin or just sitting around watching this certifiable prick fuck around for another few years. I know where my preferences would lie there. Not really sure what the issue is with that really. To steelman dyhb's position, I think the bar being raised to assassinating a sitting president as acceptable political violence, it's important to recognize all the stuff that is beneath that bar which must then also be acceptable political violence. If you're okay with Trump being assassinated, then you'd have to accept Obama being assassinated also. After all, he's just a former president and not the sitting president. I think there's merit to that concern. For myself I'm 'okay with' Trump being assassinated for a reason other than him being a republican president. Someone lost their life savings dumping into trumpcoin and then got rugpulled and wants revenge, or some similar sort of karmic justice for Trump's many moral failings. Less a political assassination, more a personal one. And yeah obviously I'd rather we weren't talking about a sitting president being assassinated, but when he's this brazenly corrupt and the system is powerless to remove him, of course people are gonna talk about other options. Literally what you saying is we need to find excuse. You also failed to identify what below the bar? Surely if it is okay to assassinate president in the name of political reason, then it should be also okay for sitting president to get rid of people advocating assassinating him, in the name of survival? Show nested quote +On July 08 2026 03:53 Falling wrote:Even if you are for cutting USAID, can you at least acknowledge that the way it was cut led to unnecessary death and suffering? If there is a support infrastructure that people are reliant upon. And then you suddenly yank it away without a transition period that's the absolutely the best way to destroy lives and the worst way to end a program. Right? And they did it while wasting food that had already been ear-marked for aid. That's was also really, really bad. Right? Unconscionable even? https://www.reuters.com/world/us-aid-cuts-leave-food-millions-mouldering-storage-2025-05-16/ That was never point of contest, although many desperately trying to do so. What was contested, was the idea that stopping helping someone makes you murderer. It seems that for quite few people here it is impossible to detach discussion about idea from discussion about a person. Show nested quote +On July 08 2026 06:17 WombaT wrote:On July 08 2026 05:26 Simberto wrote:On July 08 2026 05:09 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:It looks like we're back to trying to steal Greenland, this time threatening to not help allies militarily. (In the past, Trump has also threatened to take Greenland by military force, as well as threatened to impose additional tariffs on our allies.) Trump reignites call for US to control Greenland at NATO summit
President Donald Trump reignited his call for the United States to control Greenland, threatening to remove American soldiers from European nations over the issue, as the 2026 NATO summit got underway in Ankara on July 7. ... Referring to Greenland, Trump added: "That should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark."
Trump took NATO to the brink of disaster in January before he eventually ruled out military action to acquire Greenland and pulled back threats to impose tariffs on European allies. Tensions deescalated after Trump announced the "framework of a future deal" with NATO, Denmark and the Arctic region on security matters.
Trump's Greenland talks died down over the following months, yet Trump introduced a new threat at the NATO summit in Turkey: removing U.S. soldiers from Europe over the continent's opposition. "With all the money we spend to help them with Russia ‒ and we don't have to spend any money ‒ we could remove all of our soldiers out of Europe, because, as you probably noticed, Europe's a very different place than it was 20 years ago, a lot different, much different. ...
The United States has about 68,000 active-duty military personnel stationed in European countries. In May, the Trump administration announced the withdrawal of 5,000 US. troops from Germany in an apparent response to Chancellor Friedrich Merz's criticism of the U.S. war in Iran.
"It is a well-known position of the United States that it wants to own and take over Greenland. I hope that it is equally well-known everywhere that this is not going to happen," Frederiksen said, adding that Denmark has no plans to discuss Arctic or Greenland issues in Ankara. Greenland's government has also repeatedly said the territory is not for sale. Múte Egede, Greenland's foreign minister, in a statement said Greenland's future should be decided by its people. "That's how it has always been. And that's how it always will be," he said. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/07/07/trump-us-greenland-control-nato-summit/90836515007/ Just one week without stupid bullshit is apparently too much to ask. Your fucking manbaby just can't handle not being the center of attention for even three seconds. If that guy didn't control the worlds biggest military and has proven to make incredibly stupid and idiotic calls that hurt everyone, we could just mute him. But sadly we can't. US, get your shit together. I am so fucking tired of it. Someone could shoot Trump (in a video game), might help. et tu brute? Not even mad, just disappointed Show nested quote +On July 08 2026 09:31 LightSpectra wrote:On July 08 2026 08:45 ETisME wrote:On July 08 2026 02:53 Jankisa wrote:
It's mind boggling to me that people can smugly advocate for individuals having more money and power then whole nations of tens of millions while 5 million children die from consequences of poverty every year and still sleep at night.
I almost wrote "and feel good about themselves" but the individuals posting this shit here are clearly miserable so that definitely wouldn't work. Not your money, not yours to control or rule how to spend. Should they also stay up because how much job/wealth they have generated then? I find it annoyingly stupid how we keep looking at their wealth like it's some sort of public asset to be spent. Because it is. No billionaire has ever created their wealth ex nihilo. Labor creates wealth and the wealthy take the lion's share because they had preexisting capital to invest. The people who actually create things that advance society, like Albert Einstein, are frequently socialists. No one ever created anything ex nihilo dude, thats just not possible. Show nested quote +On July 08 2026 01:00 Jankisa wrote:On July 07 2026 22:37 WombaT wrote:On July 07 2026 22:30 Jankisa wrote:
I'm shocked that Razyda "all socialists should be killed" is on the side of "let people die from preventable diseases so Musk can add another 0 to his net worth".
I'm even more shocked that language police GH is siding with actual fascist who love cutting off aid from starving children because they are arguing with people who hurt their feelings.
oBlade comparing Bush admin who was hunting for imaginary nukes in Iraq under similar pretenses that they are doing in Iran now and was thus too busy to prevent Kim dynasty from getting their own in order to "make a point" is absolutely hilarious.
This episode has sent a huge signal to the whole world that the only way to be safe is to have nukes, it made it more likely, rather then less that Iran and any other country gets one, there are no serious geopolitical analyst or military analysts who think otherwise, but oBlade would much rather take the word of his daddy Trump and his daddy Bibi then use his brain for a change. Did Razyda actually express that sentiment? If so I must have missed it, but just to clarify. On May 22 2026 05:02 Razyda wrote:
Quite frankly, anyone advocating tax on unrealised gains, or wealth tax, for private individuals, should be either imprisoned, executed or put in mental asylum, because there is no helping such a person. Well, sorry, my bad. I misremembered how he qualified who should be killed / imprisoned, so it's not all socialists but basically anyone who wants to tax the rich, to me, socialists fit in that bucket so that's where my brain put it. Yeah... I am glad that you recommend reading history books to others, have you tried reading yourself? I assure it is very rewarding experience. I was very specific about which taxes, and haven't said anything about "the rich". bolded - what you saying is, there was 0 thinking involved, merely instinct? like an animal, basically?
I mean you have said that socialists should be imprisoned or executed so I don’t really think you can clutch your pearls about one thinking that a singular person, who’s a massive, massive arsehole and also happens to be in the most powerful office in the planet being assassinated not being the worst thing in the world.
While monkeys were invoked, it’s not really about monkeys. The point is more about small communities versus a large and often abstracted level of connection, albeit invoking monkeys.
Outside of cults, in smaller communities you simply wouldn’t see one person hoovering up a huge proportion of whatever wealth is in said community, because either people would think you’re a dick and would be socially ostracised, or they’d beat the fuck out of you if you really pushed it.
It’s only via abstraction and the increased size and complexity of the modern (or relatively modern) state that enables such behaviour.
I mean wealth and power is nothing new, but historically it often involved throwing quite a few bones out to avoid a pounding. Or it was culturally considered a good thing for the wealthy to give back to the people and nation.
The modern billionaire in this internationally connected age doesn’t have to worry about such considerations. Some do so anyway out of whatever personal values they have, but they’ll largely be 100% fine if they do nothing of societal benefit with their wealth
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Canada11581 Posts
Welp. After gutting CISA, he's fired the leadership of the Election Assistance Commission. Bit by bit subordinate every agency to Trump's personal control and who can gainsay his Election Rigged. RIGGGGGED! lies? With all the these organizations tasked with overseeing the security of elections hamstrung in their ability to do so, Trump will simply be forced to deploy the good squad and "do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections". It had to be done. Actually, it's a good thing, if you think about it.
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On July 10 2026 10:27 Razyda wrote:Show nested quote +On July 10 2026 07:27 WombaT wrote:
Can’t remember who said it, although it has Kwark vibes, but if some monkey just sat around bossing its peers around, and hoarded all the bananas, the other monkeys would probably end up beating it to death before long. It may be first time when i see someone aspiring to be a monkey... Show nested quote +On July 08 2026 15:50 Fleetfeet wrote:On July 08 2026 11:36 WombaT wrote:On July 08 2026 10:43 dyhb wrote:On July 08 2026 10:33 WombaT wrote:On July 08 2026 10:00 dyhb wrote:On July 08 2026 09:41 Billyboy wrote:On July 08 2026 09:37 dyhb wrote:On July 08 2026 09:27 Billyboy wrote:On July 08 2026 09:15 dyhb wrote:
[quote][quote]I swear that you all are trying to get pre-mad that an election win wasn't big enough to change everything, instantly, like in a Hollywood movie. The country will still be heavily divided, and that shit predates Trump and will continue after Trump. Accept a narrow victory and focus on stacking the gains 2026->2028. Softcore assassination porn and weird fantasying about avoiding Democracy when you don't like the results is not the way.
Your heart's in the right place, but your head is not. Odd strawman from my post arguing against him dying in a video game. I did say softcore porn. Hardcore porn would be saying you think Donald Trump should be assassinated prior to leaving office. Actually, transitioning from a video game to a Hollywood drama about the perfect election victory has a narrative rhyme that I missed the first time around. GH is doing what you said, he’s setting up to quote the posts of Sim and Jan, and claim they need to join his revolution or something. The rest of us are just mixing hope and despair. Small election wins in subsequent elections are the kind of progress we need and can use, and big wins are possible if Iran keeps going the way its going and the tariffs keep killing the economy. I think the morose attitude on what a small win will say about America is puerile. On July 08 2026 09:50 WombaT wrote:On July 08 2026 09:37 dyhb wrote:On July 08 2026 09:27 Billyboy wrote:On July 08 2026 09:15 dyhb wrote:
[quote][quote]I swear that you all are trying to get pre-mad that an election win wasn't big enough to change everything, instantly, like in a Hollywood movie. The country will still be heavily divided, and that shit predates Trump and will continue after Trump. Accept a narrow victory and focus on stacking the gains 2026->2028. Softcore assassination porn and weird fantasying about avoiding Democracy when you don't like the results is not the way.
Your heart's in the right place, but your head is not. Odd strawman from my post arguing against him dying in a video game. I did say softcore porn. Hardcore porn would be saying you think Donald Trump should be assassinated prior to leaving office. Actually, transitioning from a video game to a Hollywood drama about the perfect election victory has a narrative rhyme that I missed the first time around. Nonetheless I’m pretty sure Billyboy nor Simberto expressed no such assassination sentiment, so it feels odd to me to throw it out in a direct reply to them. I’ve no such compunctions and I’ll admit to that, the sooner the cunt is out of office the better. Given there are seemingly no limits to what his own party will tolerate, and he’s clearly not going to face censure for his many crimes, death is quite the equaliser, something no person can escape. Would prefer natural causes or a hilarious accident than assassination, which I don’t support. The softcore assassination porn was more directed at you and simberto ("A much better scenario than assassination in minecraft" as an evaluation of degree). To Billy, it appears that his problem with assassination is martyrdom, not assassination. I wholly reject that, I’m in the hardcore assassination porn camp, give me some credit. I don’t think that’s accurate based on Billy’s general posting and what I’ve gleamed from his musing in general. He’s free to speak for himself of course, but contextually I took him to mean ‘assassination is bad, and there may be a martyr effect’, not ‘assassination is bad because there’s a martyr effect’. And to follow your earlier billionaire logic, not sure why it’s bad really. I think the death of a person would be of a benefit for wider society, what’s the problem? If you support any domestic policy or foreign intervention that so much as kills 2 people well, you’re twice as bad as me right off the block. Because you're not the only one on the block with ideas on who in society we should kill in order to make society better off. Perhaps not but my ideas are actually good ones. Facetiousness aside maybe Republicans should have backed impeachment, as they should have if they had any gumption. Instead we’re locked into 4 years of absolutely blatant corruption, with a man who has already skirted his just desserts actively stacking institutions in his favour So I mean you can’t get rid of him via legitimate means, that ain’t happening. So it’s either health issue, assassin or just sitting around watching this certifiable prick fuck around for another few years. I know where my preferences would lie there. Not really sure what the issue is with that really. To steelman dyhb's position, I think the bar being raised to assassinating a sitting president as acceptable political violence, it's important to recognize all the stuff that is beneath that bar which must then also be acceptable political violence. If you're okay with Trump being assassinated, then you'd have to accept Obama being assassinated also. After all, he's just a former president and not the sitting president. I think there's merit to that concern. For myself I'm 'okay with' Trump being assassinated for a reason other than him being a republican president. Someone lost their life savings dumping into trumpcoin and then got rugpulled and wants revenge, or some similar sort of karmic justice for Trump's many moral failings. Less a political assassination, more a personal one. And yeah obviously I'd rather we weren't talking about a sitting president being assassinated, but when he's this brazenly corrupt and the system is powerless to remove him, of course people are gonna talk about other options. Literally what you saying is we need to find excuse. You also failed to identify what below the bar? Surely if it is okay to assassinate president in the name of political reason, then it should be also okay for sitting president to get rid of people advocating assassinating him, in the name of survival?
You're wrong with basically every word. Let me break it down for you line-by-line, so you can follow along.
Literally what you saying is we need to find excuse. I actually don't advocate for Trump's assassination, so I'm not literally saying (anyone) needs to find an excuse. The closest I get to advocating for Trump's assassination is saying that, given that the system itself is powerless to stop his corruption, it makes sense that people are talking about other solutions. "It makes sense people are talking about assassination" is a very far distance from "we just need to find an excuse"
You also failed to identify what below the bar? I never even tried to. If you want to debate the valuation of an attempted assassination on the president and who this allows him to kill, go for it. We can accept that assassinating the sitting president is a pretty high bar and that there's a lot below that bar that would displease people advocating for it. That was my point.
Surely if it is okay to assassinate president in the name of political reason, I actually offered that in a hypothetical Trump assassination I would 'be okay' with him being assassinated for personal reasons, not political ones. Even in the hypothetical I'm not okay with him being assassinated for political reasons, so whatever path you took to arrive at believing I said the opposite was dumb and you should take more time figuring it out.
then it should be also okay for sitting president to get rid of people advocating assassinating him, in the name of survival? Hey man if you hate free speech this much then sure yeah maybe you should let the president assassinate anyone he thinks is talking about assassinating him. Personally. Because the president is capable and strong.
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On July 10 2026 04:53 dyhb wrote:Show nested quote +On July 10 2026 03:42 Jankisa wrote:On July 10 2026 00:56 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 09 2026 20:54 Jankisa wrote:Zuckerberg and Page did something innovative very early on and most of the money making business that makes their respective companies insanely huge came from acquisitions of other services and websites or from developing of new services within the existing ones, all of that coding and business development was produced by people's labor.
Zuckerberg specifically is really not that good of a coder and his big invention has been stolen from the Winkevi twins.
Some of those people have been handsomely compensated with stock options so they are certainly very rich right now, but they are absolutely nowhere in the neighborhood of $300 billion level rich of those two, and the contributions of those 2 and the value of their labor is not x 1000 or whatever it is as compared to the person who coded Gmail or Youtube.
Also, the whole conversation is not and should not be who deserves how much money, the issue is what do those people use that money and power that comes with it for.
Gates is not perfect but he did help save millions of lives, McKenzie Scott is trying to give away as much of her wealth as she can and she is helping many, and it's an absolute shame that she is out donating people like Page, Musk, Brin, Elison, not only in % of her net worth but also in absolute terms. + Show Spoiler +
These people generated the vast majority of their wealth off of labor of others and by exploiting their customers, creators on their platforms etc., in a just society they would be made to use that money for good, unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions the world has very few just societies, and USA is firmly very close to the bottom of the list of unjust ones.
What is more important than their personal predilections is that NO ONE has donated more than McKenzie Scott has since she divorced Bezos. Despite that, she's got about as much wealth as she did when she started (maybe more, we can't truly know). That speaks to problems so far beyond wealthy individuals and their charity choices that the typical "good guy vs bad guy" (or rather "evil person vs less evil person") political framing can't address. I personally don't like categorizing people into the "evil" category, just broken. I firmly believe that once you reach a certain threshold of wealth the brain of an average human gets broken in a way where they cease to care about anything other then maximizing their wealth and power. It's a competition and letting someone have a bigger number then you is the ultimate defeat, to people who believe they are the best and the smartest losing is the biggest fear in their life, losing 5 % of their wealth is catastrophic, especially since more you have the bigger number those 5 % represent, so they just go insane and become these fucked up embodiment of Capitalism, When some of them reach a threshold where they are so rich they don't know what else to do, like Putin or Trump, they start chasing "history" and we all pay the price for that. When some of them reach a point where their tweets can move markets and they face no consequences for manipulating them, like Musk, they get addicted to that and they want to change the world into what they think it should be. There are, of course, notable exceptions, Warren Buffet, to me, by all extents and proposes seems to be a decent bloke, so it's not all of them, or in the case of Gates, not all of them all of the time, but in general, this kind of wealth really, really fucks you up to the point where you join the Epstein class and you never go back. The most broken ones aren't them, they have been put in extreme circumstances, to me it's their defenders, people who don't really have a lot of adversity in life but have been brainwashed by media and their upbringing into thinking that accumulation of Capital is the ultimate goal of civilization, and as you can see form this thread they are very passionate about defending these other broken individuals because they have been convinced, basically like this: The cartoon rich guy manipulating the working class to blame an immigrant certainly makes this post humorous. Is this a satire of Marxist class consciousness, or an actual good-faith proposal? The entire post needs an Orwell caption directly below Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred—a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacuo hatred—against the exploiters.
Blaming the immigrants / the blacks / the libs to convince working class Americans to vote against their interests and for the bottom line a class of ultra rich donors has literally been the whole agenda of the GOP since Reagan, but I’m not surprised you didn’t notice.
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Imho the comic doesn't go far enough anyway.
The rich guy should (try to) take the last cookie from the "concerned citizen" to defend him from the brown guy. Maybe that why even the truely dim would understand it.
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On July 10 2026 17:33 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On July 10 2026 04:53 dyhb wrote:On July 10 2026 03:42 Jankisa wrote:On July 10 2026 00:56 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 09 2026 20:54 Jankisa wrote:Zuckerberg and Page did something innovative very early on and most of the money making business that makes their respective companies insanely huge came from acquisitions of other services and websites or from developing of new services within the existing ones, all of that coding and business development was produced by people's labor.
Zuckerberg specifically is really not that good of a coder and his big invention has been stolen from the Winkevi twins.
Some of those people have been handsomely compensated with stock options so they are certainly very rich right now, but they are absolutely nowhere in the neighborhood of $300 billion level rich of those two, and the contributions of those 2 and the value of their labor is not x 1000 or whatever it is as compared to the person who coded Gmail or Youtube.
Also, the whole conversation is not and should not be who deserves how much money, the issue is what do those people use that money and power that comes with it for.
Gates is not perfect but he did help save millions of lives, McKenzie Scott is trying to give away as much of her wealth as she can and she is helping many, and it's an absolute shame that she is out donating people like Page, Musk, Brin, Elison, not only in % of her net worth but also in absolute terms. + Show Spoiler +
These people generated the vast majority of their wealth off of labor of others and by exploiting their customers, creators on their platforms etc., in a just society they would be made to use that money for good, unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions the world has very few just societies, and USA is firmly very close to the bottom of the list of unjust ones.
What is more important than their personal predilections is that NO ONE has donated more than McKenzie Scott has since she divorced Bezos. Despite that, she's got about as much wealth as she did when she started (maybe more, we can't truly know). That speaks to problems so far beyond wealthy individuals and their charity choices that the typical "good guy vs bad guy" (or rather "evil person vs less evil person") political framing can't address. I personally don't like categorizing people into the "evil" category, just broken. I firmly believe that once you reach a certain threshold of wealth the brain of an average human gets broken in a way where they cease to care about anything other then maximizing their wealth and power. It's a competition and letting someone have a bigger number then you is the ultimate defeat, to people who believe they are the best and the smartest losing is the biggest fear in their life, losing 5 % of their wealth is catastrophic, especially since more you have the bigger number those 5 % represent, so they just go insane and become these fucked up embodiment of Capitalism, When some of them reach a threshold where they are so rich they don't know what else to do, like Putin or Trump, they start chasing "history" and we all pay the price for that. When some of them reach a point where their tweets can move markets and they face no consequences for manipulating them, like Musk, they get addicted to that and they want to change the world into what they think it should be. There are, of course, notable exceptions, Warren Buffet, to me, by all extents and proposes seems to be a decent bloke, so it's not all of them, or in the case of Gates, not all of them all of the time, but in general, this kind of wealth really, really fucks you up to the point where you join the Epstein class and you never go back. The most broken ones aren't them, they have been put in extreme circumstances, to me it's their defenders, people who don't really have a lot of adversity in life but have been brainwashed by media and their upbringing into thinking that accumulation of Capital is the ultimate goal of civilization, and as you can see form this thread they are very passionate about defending these other broken individuals because they have been convinced, basically like this: The cartoon rich guy manipulating the working class to blame an immigrant certainly makes this post humorous. Is this a satire of Marxist class consciousness, or an actual good-faith proposal? The entire post needs an Orwell caption directly below Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred—a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacuo hatred—against the exploiters. Blaming the immigrants / the blacks / the libs to convince working class Americans to vote against their interests and for the bottom line a class of ultra rich donors has literally been the whole agenda of the GOP since Reagan, but I’m not surprised you didn’t notice. It's also a pretty clever dodge when you're actually out of touch with working class interests, and are now a party of a highly-educated laptop class serving their own interests. The man at a table telling people what to think is the modern Democratic campaign consultant, and his message to the working class is that they're too poor, too uneducated, and too easily manipulated to actually know what's good for them. The sales pitch was doomed to fail.
A sane party has to keep the middle class socialists in check. Bill Clinton did this with an authentic "I feel your pain" pitch and his understanding of Arkansas voters, and Obama did it with skillful broad-based oration for as long as he could. The same problem in Orwell's time resurfaced. You don't give a damn about the actual lives of less fortunate families than your own. You're just envious of the rich and burn with hatred for them. Connection to the family struggles brought on by gas prices and tariffs play second fiddle to how evil Elon is for making so much money and boy do we have to punish these rich and successful guys for having so much wealth and power! It's toxic. Granted, I believe some of you realize this at a deep level, but feel like doubling down is the only choice left available.
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I love reading dyhb posts, it's like peering into the mind of a hamster forced to listen to Ayn Rand audiobooks for its entire lifespan.
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On July 10 2026 21:49 LightSpectra wrote:
I love reading dyhb posts, it's like peering into the mind of a hamster forced to listen to Ayn Rand audiobooks for its entire lifespan. LightSpectra's seated at the middle, and he has two former Democratic party voters at the table.
They tell him to start talking more about their interests.
He reaches into his pocket and finds two index cards. One says to go for insults like Ayn Rand audiobook listeners. The other is to talk more about Elon Musk and the Epstein class. He searches for more and comes up empty.
He realized he's tried everything, and come up empty.
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You do your damn hardest every day to defend Epstein customers if that's what it's gotta take to not feel empty inside, my dude. lol.
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On July 10 2026 22:00 LightSpectra wrote:
You do your damn hardest every day to defend Epstein customers if that's what it's gotta take to not feel empty inside, my dude. lol. I swear to the thread that I have not bribed or otherwise influenced LightSpectra to illustrate my point on Democratic party disconnection from dialoguing on working class problems. I believe this to be his completely authentic contribution to how Republicans and Democrats woo working class voters.
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On July 10 2026 21:42 dyhb wrote:Show nested quote +On July 10 2026 17:33 Biff The Understudy wrote:On July 10 2026 04:53 dyhb wrote:On July 10 2026 03:42 Jankisa wrote:On July 10 2026 00:56 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 09 2026 20:54 Jankisa wrote:Zuckerberg and Page did something innovative very early on and most of the money making business that makes their respective companies insanely huge came from acquisitions of other services and websites or from developing of new services within the existing ones, all of that coding and business development was produced by people's labor.
Zuckerberg specifically is really not that good of a coder and his big invention has been stolen from the Winkevi twins.
Some of those people have been handsomely compensated with stock options so they are certainly very rich right now, but they are absolutely nowhere in the neighborhood of $300 billion level rich of those two, and the contributions of those 2 and the value of their labor is not x 1000 or whatever it is as compared to the person who coded Gmail or Youtube.
Also, the whole conversation is not and should not be who deserves how much money, the issue is what do those people use that money and power that comes with it for.
Gates is not perfect but he did help save millions of lives, McKenzie Scott is trying to give away as much of her wealth as she can and she is helping many, and it's an absolute shame that she is out donating people like Page, Musk, Brin, Elison, not only in % of her net worth but also in absolute terms. + Show Spoiler +
These people generated the vast majority of their wealth off of labor of others and by exploiting their customers, creators on their platforms etc., in a just society they would be made to use that money for good, unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions the world has very few just societies, and USA is firmly very close to the bottom of the list of unjust ones.
What is more important than their personal predilections is that NO ONE has donated more than McKenzie Scott has since she divorced Bezos. Despite that, she's got about as much wealth as she did when she started (maybe more, we can't truly know). That speaks to problems so far beyond wealthy individuals and their charity choices that the typical "good guy vs bad guy" (or rather "evil person vs less evil person") political framing can't address. I personally don't like categorizing people into the "evil" category, just broken. I firmly believe that once you reach a certain threshold of wealth the brain of an average human gets broken in a way where they cease to care about anything other then maximizing their wealth and power. It's a competition and letting someone have a bigger number then you is the ultimate defeat, to people who believe they are the best and the smartest losing is the biggest fear in their life, losing 5 % of their wealth is catastrophic, especially since more you have the bigger number those 5 % represent, so they just go insane and become these fucked up embodiment of Capitalism, When some of them reach a threshold where they are so rich they don't know what else to do, like Putin or Trump, they start chasing "history" and we all pay the price for that. When some of them reach a point where their tweets can move markets and they face no consequences for manipulating them, like Musk, they get addicted to that and they want to change the world into what they think it should be. There are, of course, notable exceptions, Warren Buffet, to me, by all extents and proposes seems to be a decent bloke, so it's not all of them, or in the case of Gates, not all of them all of the time, but in general, this kind of wealth really, really fucks you up to the point where you join the Epstein class and you never go back. The most broken ones aren't them, they have been put in extreme circumstances, to me it's their defenders, people who don't really have a lot of adversity in life but have been brainwashed by media and their upbringing into thinking that accumulation of Capital is the ultimate goal of civilization, and as you can see form this thread they are very passionate about defending these other broken individuals because they have been convinced, basically like this: The cartoon rich guy manipulating the working class to blame an immigrant certainly makes this post humorous. Is this a satire of Marxist class consciousness, or an actual good-faith proposal? The entire post needs an Orwell caption directly below Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred—a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacuo hatred—against the exploiters. Blaming the immigrants / the blacks / the libs to convince working class Americans to vote against their interests and for the bottom line a class of ultra rich donors has literally been the whole agenda of the GOP since Reagan, but I’m not surprised you didn’t notice. It's also a pretty clever dodge when you're actually out of touch with working class interests, and are now a party of a highly-educated laptop class serving their own interests. The man at a table telling people what to think is the modern Democratic campaign consultant, and his message to the working class is that they're too poor, too uneducated, and too easily manipulated to actually know what's good for them. The sales pitch was doomed to fail. A sane party has to keep the middle class socialists in check. Bill Clinton did this with an authentic "I feel your pain" pitch and his understanding of Arkansas voters, and Obama did it with skillful broad-based oration for as long as he could. The same problem in Orwell's time resurfaced. You don't give a damn about the actual lives of less fortunate families than your own. You're just envious of the rich and burn with hatred for them. Connection to the family struggles brought on by gas prices and tariffs play second fiddle to how evil Elon is for making so much money and boy do we have to punish these rich and successful guys for having so much wealth and power! It's toxic. Granted, I believe some of you realize this at a deep level, but feel like doubling down is the only choice left available.
I have zero envy for the rich and especially not someone like Elon. I have an amazing life, and he seems like a really miserable fuck. And tacky superyachts don’t inspire me.
We live in an economic order that is broken to the benefits of a very few and at the expense of most folks. It’s just a fact that wages and quality of life has stagnated or declined for most people while a very small minority is getting exponentially richer.
Those folks have a ridiculous amount of political power, finance politicians, and own most of the media.
Again there is no conspiracy here, it’s a cold fact.
Now, the GOP havs had a platform that is insanely beneficial to the ultra rich. Tax cuts for billionaires, deregulations, maximization of corporate profit has been the core of their policies, since Reagan.
To get people that they are actually fucking in the ass to vote for them, they have exploited the resentment of the working class to the “other”. You are in the shit because of the black welfare queens, or because Mexican take your jobs. Your community is falling apart because of the trans, or because of the liberal elites on the coast.
That’s not original. The far right does that here. Billionaire Bolloré owns a gigantic proportion of the media in France, and uses his empire to hammer into people’s head that wage stagnate because the Arabs are stealing our jobs, not because people like him are hoarding the growth of this country.
You are the only one who think this is controversial. There is nothing Marxist there.
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On July 10 2026 22:20 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On July 10 2026 21:42 dyhb wrote:On July 10 2026 17:33 Biff The Understudy wrote:On July 10 2026 04:53 dyhb wrote:On July 10 2026 03:42 Jankisa wrote:On July 10 2026 00:56 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 09 2026 20:54 Jankisa wrote:Zuckerberg and Page did something innovative very early on and most of the money making business that makes their respective companies insanely huge came from acquisitions of other services and websites or from developing of new services within the existing ones, all of that coding and business development was produced by people's labor.
Zuckerberg specifically is really not that good of a coder and his big invention has been stolen from the Winkevi twins.
Some of those people have been handsomely compensated with stock options so they are certainly very rich right now, but they are absolutely nowhere in the neighborhood of $300 billion level rich of those two, and the contributions of those 2 and the value of their labor is not x 1000 or whatever it is as compared to the person who coded Gmail or Youtube.
Also, the whole conversation is not and should not be who deserves how much money, the issue is what do those people use that money and power that comes with it for.
Gates is not perfect but he did help save millions of lives, McKenzie Scott is trying to give away as much of her wealth as she can and she is helping many, and it's an absolute shame that she is out donating people like Page, Musk, Brin, Elison, not only in % of her net worth but also in absolute terms. + Show Spoiler +
These people generated the vast majority of their wealth off of labor of others and by exploiting their customers, creators on their platforms etc., in a just society they would be made to use that money for good, unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions the world has very few just societies, and USA is firmly very close to the bottom of the list of unjust ones.
What is more important than their personal predilections is that NO ONE has donated more than McKenzie Scott has since she divorced Bezos. Despite that, she's got about as much wealth as she did when she started (maybe more, we can't truly know). That speaks to problems so far beyond wealthy individuals and their charity choices that the typical "good guy vs bad guy" (or rather "evil person vs less evil person") political framing can't address. I personally don't like categorizing people into the "evil" category, just broken. I firmly believe that once you reach a certain threshold of wealth the brain of an average human gets broken in a way where they cease to care about anything other then maximizing their wealth and power. It's a competition and letting someone have a bigger number then you is the ultimate defeat, to people who believe they are the best and the smartest losing is the biggest fear in their life, losing 5 % of their wealth is catastrophic, especially since more you have the bigger number those 5 % represent, so they just go insane and become these fucked up embodiment of Capitalism, When some of them reach a threshold where they are so rich they don't know what else to do, like Putin or Trump, they start chasing "history" and we all pay the price for that. When some of them reach a point where their tweets can move markets and they face no consequences for manipulating them, like Musk, they get addicted to that and they want to change the world into what they think it should be. There are, of course, notable exceptions, Warren Buffet, to me, by all extents and proposes seems to be a decent bloke, so it's not all of them, or in the case of Gates, not all of them all of the time, but in general, this kind of wealth really, really fucks you up to the point where you join the Epstein class and you never go back. The most broken ones aren't them, they have been put in extreme circumstances, to me it's their defenders, people who don't really have a lot of adversity in life but have been brainwashed by media and their upbringing into thinking that accumulation of Capital is the ultimate goal of civilization, and as you can see form this thread they are very passionate about defending these other broken individuals because they have been convinced, basically like this: The cartoon rich guy manipulating the working class to blame an immigrant certainly makes this post humorous. Is this a satire of Marxist class consciousness, or an actual good-faith proposal? The entire post needs an Orwell caption directly below Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred—a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacuo hatred—against the exploiters. Blaming the immigrants / the blacks / the libs to convince working class Americans to vote against their interests and for the bottom line a class of ultra rich donors has literally been the whole agenda of the GOP since Reagan, but I’m not surprised you didn’t notice. It's also a pretty clever dodge when you're actually out of touch with working class interests, and are now a party of a highly-educated laptop class serving their own interests. The man at a table telling people what to think is the modern Democratic campaign consultant, and his message to the working class is that they're too poor, too uneducated, and too easily manipulated to actually know what's good for them. The sales pitch was doomed to fail. A sane party has to keep the middle class socialists in check. Bill Clinton did this with an authentic "I feel your pain" pitch and his understanding of Arkansas voters, and Obama did it with skillful broad-based oration for as long as he could. The same problem in Orwell's time resurfaced. You don't give a damn about the actual lives of less fortunate families than your own. You're just envious of the rich and burn with hatred for them. Connection to the family struggles brought on by gas prices and tariffs play second fiddle to how evil Elon is for making so much money and boy do we have to punish these rich and successful guys for having so much wealth and power! It's toxic. Granted, I believe some of you realize this at a deep level, but feel like doubling down is the only choice left available. I have zero envy for the rich and especially not someone like Elon. I have an amazing life, and he seems like a really miserable fuck. And tacky superyachts don’t inspire me. We live in an economic order that is broken to the benefits of a very few and at the expense of most folks. It’s just a fact that wages and quality of life has stagnated or declined for most people while a very small minority is getting exponentially richer. Those folks have a ridiculous amount of political power, finance politicians, and own most of the media. Again there is no conspiracy here, it’s a cold fact. This post is an improvement to your prior posts. Do you understand that "once you reach a certain threshold of wealth the brain of an average human gets broken" " they cease to care about anything other then maximizing their wealth and power" "people who believe they are the best and the smartest losing is the biggest fear in their life" " they get addicted to that" means you will fail to dodge the reasonable conclusion that you're driven by envy and hatred of the rich.
We hear about the reverse in the popular media all the time: They're defending billionaires (how weird!), they're bootlickers, etc. They, like you, will protest that it's just economic cold, hard facts. Do they, like you, get out of jail free with that excuse?
Now, the GOP havs had a platform that is insanely beneficial to the ultra rich. Tax cuts for billionaires, deregulations, maximization of corporate profit has been the core of their policies, since Reagan. No real argument here.
To get people that they are actually fucking in the ass to vote for them, they have exploited the resentment of the working class to the “other”. You are in the shit because of the black welfare queens, or because Mexican take your jobs. Your community is falling apart because of the trans, or because of the liberal elites on the coast.
That’s not original. The far right does that here. Billionaire Bolloré owns a gigantic proportion of the media in France, and uses his empire to hammer into people’s head that wage stagnate because the Arabs are stealing our jobs, not because people like him are hoarding the growth of this country. I just have to break with you hard here. You're also exploiting the resentment of the rich to get an economic lower class to blame them (instead of, say, immigrants, a poor justice system and crime policing, a bad education system, economically-destructive policies, bad left-wing policies in general). The manipulation is just the reverse side of the same coin. You simply personally believe you're right (hopefully, you persuasively argue that you're right and they're wrong).
That's why I put you in that center chair, and you're pointing at two working-class voters, and you're telling them that the rich are to blame for their problems. The words you used in the first post spectacularly carry the message that you're envious and hateful. You may not feel that it's true of you in your heart (of cold hard facts), but it's how the message carries to the audience. That's why I also talk about it as a disconnect. The messaging is disconnected from the audience and I'm pointing out the reasons why.
You are the only one who think this is controversial. There is nothing Marxist there. You're better off saying it's right despite being overt Marxist false consciousness. The working class (proletariat) is being exploited by the rich elite (bourgeoisie), but the exploited class has been politically manipulated to hold beliefs and values that work against their true class interests. That's pure Engels false consciousness. Practical TL.net posters, who believe themselves quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some (historical thinkers). It's always the other guy that's stuck in some rehashed bunkum from Reagan, and never ourselves!
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Northern Ireland27202 Posts
On July 10 2026 21:42 dyhb wrote:Show nested quote +On July 10 2026 17:33 Biff The Understudy wrote:On July 10 2026 04:53 dyhb wrote:On July 10 2026 03:42 Jankisa wrote:On July 10 2026 00:56 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 09 2026 20:54 Jankisa wrote:Zuckerberg and Page did something innovative very early on and most of the money making business that makes their respective companies insanely huge came from acquisitions of other services and websites or from developing of new services within the existing ones, all of that coding and business development was produced by people's labor.
Zuckerberg specifically is really not that good of a coder and his big invention has been stolen from the Winkevi twins.
Some of those people have been handsomely compensated with stock options so they are certainly very rich right now, but they are absolutely nowhere in the neighborhood of $300 billion level rich of those two, and the contributions of those 2 and the value of their labor is not x 1000 or whatever it is as compared to the person who coded Gmail or Youtube.
Also, the whole conversation is not and should not be who deserves how much money, the issue is what do those people use that money and power that comes with it for.
Gates is not perfect but he did help save millions of lives, McKenzie Scott is trying to give away as much of her wealth as she can and she is helping many, and it's an absolute shame that she is out donating people like Page, Musk, Brin, Elison, not only in % of her net worth but also in absolute terms. + Show Spoiler +
These people generated the vast majority of their wealth off of labor of others and by exploiting their customers, creators on their platforms etc., in a just society they would be made to use that money for good, unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions the world has very few just societies, and USA is firmly very close to the bottom of the list of unjust ones.
What is more important than their personal predilections is that NO ONE has donated more than McKenzie Scott has since she divorced Bezos. Despite that, she's got about as much wealth as she did when she started (maybe more, we can't truly know). That speaks to problems so far beyond wealthy individuals and their charity choices that the typical "good guy vs bad guy" (or rather "evil person vs less evil person") political framing can't address. I personally don't like categorizing people into the "evil" category, just broken. I firmly believe that once you reach a certain threshold of wealth the brain of an average human gets broken in a way where they cease to care about anything other then maximizing their wealth and power. It's a competition and letting someone have a bigger number then you is the ultimate defeat, to people who believe they are the best and the smartest losing is the biggest fear in their life, losing 5 % of their wealth is catastrophic, especially since more you have the bigger number those 5 % represent, so they just go insane and become these fucked up embodiment of Capitalism, When some of them reach a threshold where they are so rich they don't know what else to do, like Putin or Trump, they start chasing "history" and we all pay the price for that. When some of them reach a point where their tweets can move markets and they face no consequences for manipulating them, like Musk, they get addicted to that and they want to change the world into what they think it should be. There are, of course, notable exceptions, Warren Buffet, to me, by all extents and proposes seems to be a decent bloke, so it's not all of them, or in the case of Gates, not all of them all of the time, but in general, this kind of wealth really, really fucks you up to the point where you join the Epstein class and you never go back. The most broken ones aren't them, they have been put in extreme circumstances, to me it's their defenders, people who don't really have a lot of adversity in life but have been brainwashed by media and their upbringing into thinking that accumulation of Capital is the ultimate goal of civilization, and as you can see form this thread they are very passionate about defending these other broken individuals because they have been convinced, basically like this: The cartoon rich guy manipulating the working class to blame an immigrant certainly makes this post humorous. Is this a satire of Marxist class consciousness, or an actual good-faith proposal? The entire post needs an Orwell caption directly below Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred—a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacuo hatred—against the exploiters. Blaming the immigrants / the blacks / the libs to convince working class Americans to vote against their interests and for the bottom line a class of ultra rich donors has literally been the whole agenda of the GOP since Reagan, but I’m not surprised you didn’t notice. It's also a pretty clever dodge when you're actually out of touch with working class interests, and are now a party of a highly-educated laptop class serving their own interests. The man at a table telling people what to think is the modern Democratic campaign consultant, and his message to the working class is that they're too poor, too uneducated, and too easily manipulated to actually know what's good for them. The sales pitch was doomed to fail. A sane party has to keep the middle class socialists in check. Bill Clinton did this with an authentic "I feel your pain" pitch and his understanding of Arkansas voters, and Obama did it with skillful broad-based oration for as long as he could. The same problem in Orwell's time resurfaced. You don't give a damn about the actual lives of less fortunate families than your own. You're just envious of the rich and burn with hatred for them. Connection to the family struggles brought on by gas prices and tariffs play second fiddle to how evil Elon is for making so much money and boy do we have to punish these rich and successful guys for having so much wealth and power! It's toxic. Granted, I believe some of you realize this at a deep level, but feel like doubling down is the only choice left available.
If some of the rich weren’t complete arseholes who leverage their power to make the lives of the poor worse, and merely sat around doing other things with their wealth, there’d be considerably less of that anger. I mean it’d still be there, but far less of it.
Point taken on resonant messaging, clearly a problem.
Equally I think the idea that people of a wealthier persuasion who also say they want a more equitable society not actually holding those beliefs to be a bit daft. And even if it is purely performative, it’s preferable to a genuine belief in fucking the poorer over
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On July 10 2026 23:15 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On July 10 2026 21:42 dyhb wrote:On July 10 2026 17:33 Biff The Understudy wrote:On July 10 2026 04:53 dyhb wrote:On July 10 2026 03:42 Jankisa wrote:On July 10 2026 00:56 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 09 2026 20:54 Jankisa wrote:Zuckerberg and Page did something innovative very early on and most of the money making business that makes their respective companies insanely huge came from acquisitions of other services and websites or from developing of new services within the existing ones, all of that coding and business development was produced by people's labor.
Zuckerberg specifically is really not that good of a coder and his big invention has been stolen from the Winkevi twins.
Some of those people have been handsomely compensated with stock options so they are certainly very rich right now, but they are absolutely nowhere in the neighborhood of $300 billion level rich of those two, and the contributions of those 2 and the value of their labor is not x 1000 or whatever it is as compared to the person who coded Gmail or Youtube.
Also, the whole conversation is not and should not be who deserves how much money, the issue is what do those people use that money and power that comes with it for.
Gates is not perfect but he did help save millions of lives, McKenzie Scott is trying to give away as much of her wealth as she can and she is helping many, and it's an absolute shame that she is out donating people like Page, Musk, Brin, Elison, not only in % of her net worth but also in absolute terms. + Show Spoiler +
These people generated the vast majority of their wealth off of labor of others and by exploiting their customers, creators on their platforms etc., in a just society they would be made to use that money for good, unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions the world has very few just societies, and USA is firmly very close to the bottom of the list of unjust ones.
What is more important than their personal predilections is that NO ONE has donated more than McKenzie Scott has since she divorced Bezos. Despite that, she's got about as much wealth as she did when she started (maybe more, we can't truly know). That speaks to problems so far beyond wealthy individuals and their charity choices that the typical "good guy vs bad guy" (or rather "evil person vs less evil person") political framing can't address. I personally don't like categorizing people into the "evil" category, just broken. I firmly believe that once you reach a certain threshold of wealth the brain of an average human gets broken in a way where they cease to care about anything other then maximizing their wealth and power. It's a competition and letting someone have a bigger number then you is the ultimate defeat, to people who believe they are the best and the smartest losing is the biggest fear in their life, losing 5 % of their wealth is catastrophic, especially since more you have the bigger number those 5 % represent, so they just go insane and become these fucked up embodiment of Capitalism, When some of them reach a threshold where they are so rich they don't know what else to do, like Putin or Trump, they start chasing "history" and we all pay the price for that. When some of them reach a point where their tweets can move markets and they face no consequences for manipulating them, like Musk, they get addicted to that and they want to change the world into what they think it should be. There are, of course, notable exceptions, Warren Buffet, to me, by all extents and proposes seems to be a decent bloke, so it's not all of them, or in the case of Gates, not all of them all of the time, but in general, this kind of wealth really, really fucks you up to the point where you join the Epstein class and you never go back. The most broken ones aren't them, they have been put in extreme circumstances, to me it's their defenders, people who don't really have a lot of adversity in life but have been brainwashed by media and their upbringing into thinking that accumulation of Capital is the ultimate goal of civilization, and as you can see form this thread they are very passionate about defending these other broken individuals because they have been convinced, basically like this: The cartoon rich guy manipulating the working class to blame an immigrant certainly makes this post humorous. Is this a satire of Marxist class consciousness, or an actual good-faith proposal? The entire post needs an Orwell caption directly below Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred—a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacuo hatred—against the exploiters. Blaming the immigrants / the blacks / the libs to convince working class Americans to vote against their interests and for the bottom line a class of ultra rich donors has literally been the whole agenda of the GOP since Reagan, but I’m not surprised you didn’t notice. It's also a pretty clever dodge when you're actually out of touch with working class interests, and are now a party of a highly-educated laptop class serving their own interests. The man at a table telling people what to think is the modern Democratic campaign consultant, and his message to the working class is that they're too poor, too uneducated, and too easily manipulated to actually know what's good for them. The sales pitch was doomed to fail. A sane party has to keep the middle class socialists in check. Bill Clinton did this with an authentic "I feel your pain" pitch and his understanding of Arkansas voters, and Obama did it with skillful broad-based oration for as long as he could. The same problem in Orwell's time resurfaced. You don't give a damn about the actual lives of less fortunate families than your own. You're just envious of the rich and burn with hatred for them. Connection to the family struggles brought on by gas prices and tariffs play second fiddle to how evil Elon is for making so much money and boy do we have to punish these rich and successful guys for having so much wealth and power! It's toxic. Granted, I believe some of you realize this at a deep level, but feel like doubling down is the only choice left available. If some of the rich weren’t complete arseholes who leverage their power to make the lives of the poor worse, and merely sat around doing other things with their wealth, there’d be considerably less of that anger. I mean it’d still be there, but far less of it. Point taken on resonant messaging, clearly a problem. Equally I think the idea that people of a wealthier persuasion who also say they want a more equitable society not actually holding those beliefs to be a bit daft. And even if it is purely performative, it’s preferable to a genuine belief in fucking the poorer over I don't want to come down too hard on one left-winger venting to another left-winger on an internet forum dominated by left-wing discourse about the latest example of a rich guy doing something bad for society with his power and influence. That's harmless pub talk and I might agree half the time. They have too much power and influence in government and in both political parties.
I think most of you realize this is a segment representing ~16% to ~22% of Americans. (You can get ~30-35% if we're excluding divisive social and cultural issues and the hyperbole is toned down slightly). Both of those are very rough estimates. You won't get stable governing majorities of the required length to reverse Trump's excesses by using the in-group accepted language to the out-group. It might help if you pretend you are the out-group trying to convince the in-group that you aren't a billionaire boot-licker and shill when you use their language to describe their version of the cold, hard facts.
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On July 10 2026 23:14 dyhb wrote:Show nested quote +On July 10 2026 22:20 Biff The Understudy wrote:On July 10 2026 21:42 dyhb wrote:On July 10 2026 17:33 Biff The Understudy wrote:On July 10 2026 04:53 dyhb wrote:On July 10 2026 03:42 Jankisa wrote:On July 10 2026 00:56 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 09 2026 20:54 Jankisa wrote:Zuckerberg and Page did something innovative very early on and most of the money making business that makes their respective companies insanely huge came from acquisitions of other services and websites or from developing of new services within the existing ones, all of that coding and business development was produced by people's labor.
Zuckerberg specifically is really not that good of a coder and his big invention has been stolen from the Winkevi twins.
Some of those people have been handsomely compensated with stock options so they are certainly very rich right now, but they are absolutely nowhere in the neighborhood of $300 billion level rich of those two, and the contributions of those 2 and the value of their labor is not x 1000 or whatever it is as compared to the person who coded Gmail or Youtube.
Also, the whole conversation is not and should not be who deserves how much money, the issue is what do those people use that money and power that comes with it for.
Gates is not perfect but he did help save millions of lives, McKenzie Scott is trying to give away as much of her wealth as she can and she is helping many, and it's an absolute shame that she is out donating people like Page, Musk, Brin, Elison, not only in % of her net worth but also in absolute terms. + Show Spoiler +
These people generated the vast majority of their wealth off of labor of others and by exploiting their customers, creators on their platforms etc., in a just society they would be made to use that money for good, unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions the world has very few just societies, and USA is firmly very close to the bottom of the list of unjust ones.
What is more important than their personal predilections is that NO ONE has donated more than McKenzie Scott has since she divorced Bezos. Despite that, she's got about as much wealth as she did when she started (maybe more, we can't truly know). That speaks to problems so far beyond wealthy individuals and their charity choices that the typical "good guy vs bad guy" (or rather "evil person vs less evil person") political framing can't address. I personally don't like categorizing people into the "evil" category, just broken. I firmly believe that once you reach a certain threshold of wealth the brain of an average human gets broken in a way where they cease to care about anything other then maximizing their wealth and power. It's a competition and letting someone have a bigger number then you is the ultimate defeat, to people who believe they are the best and the smartest losing is the biggest fear in their life, losing 5 % of their wealth is catastrophic, especially since more you have the bigger number those 5 % represent, so they just go insane and become these fucked up embodiment of Capitalism, When some of them reach a threshold where they are so rich they don't know what else to do, like Putin or Trump, they start chasing "history" and we all pay the price for that. When some of them reach a point where their tweets can move markets and they face no consequences for manipulating them, like Musk, they get addicted to that and they want to change the world into what they think it should be. There are, of course, notable exceptions, Warren Buffet, to me, by all extents and proposes seems to be a decent bloke, so it's not all of them, or in the case of Gates, not all of them all of the time, but in general, this kind of wealth really, really fucks you up to the point where you join the Epstein class and you never go back. The most broken ones aren't them, they have been put in extreme circumstances, to me it's their defenders, people who don't really have a lot of adversity in life but have been brainwashed by media and their upbringing into thinking that accumulation of Capital is the ultimate goal of civilization, and as you can see form this thread they are very passionate about defending these other broken individuals because they have been convinced, basically like this: The cartoon rich guy manipulating the working class to blame an immigrant certainly makes this post humorous. Is this a satire of Marxist class consciousness, or an actual good-faith proposal? The entire post needs an Orwell caption directly below Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred—a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacuo hatred—against the exploiters. Blaming the immigrants / the blacks / the libs to convince working class Americans to vote against their interests and for the bottom line a class of ultra rich donors has literally been the whole agenda of the GOP since Reagan, but I’m not surprised you didn’t notice. It's also a pretty clever dodge when you're actually out of touch with working class interests, and are now a party of a highly-educated laptop class serving their own interests. The man at a table telling people what to think is the modern Democratic campaign consultant, and his message to the working class is that they're too poor, too uneducated, and too easily manipulated to actually know what's good for them. The sales pitch was doomed to fail. A sane party has to keep the middle class socialists in check. Bill Clinton did this with an authentic "I feel your pain" pitch and his understanding of Arkansas voters, and Obama did it with skillful broad-based oration for as long as he could. The same problem in Orwell's time resurfaced. You don't give a damn about the actual lives of less fortunate families than your own. You're just envious of the rich and burn with hatred for them. Connection to the family struggles brought on by gas prices and tariffs play second fiddle to how evil Elon is for making so much money and boy do we have to punish these rich and successful guys for having so much wealth and power! It's toxic. Granted, I believe some of you realize this at a deep level, but feel like doubling down is the only choice left available. I have zero envy for the rich and especially not someone like Elon. I have an amazing life, and he seems like a really miserable fuck. And tacky superyachts don’t inspire me. We live in an economic order that is broken to the benefits of a very few and at the expense of most folks. It’s just a fact that wages and quality of life has stagnated or declined for most people while a very small minority is getting exponentially richer. Those folks have a ridiculous amount of political power, finance politicians, and own most of the media. Again there is no conspiracy here, it’s a cold fact. This post is an improvement to your prior posts. Do you understand that "once you reach a certain threshold of wealth the brain of an average human gets broken" " they cease to care about anything other then maximizing their wealth and power" "people who believe they are the best and the smartest losing is the biggest fear in their life" " they get addicted to that" means you will fail to dodge the reasonable conclusion that you're driven by envy and hatred of the rich. We hear about the reverse in the popular media all the time: They're defending billionaires (how weird!), they're bootlickers, etc. They, like you, will protest that it's just economic cold, hard facts. Do they, like you, get out of jail free with that excuse? Show nested quote +Now, the GOP havs had a platform that is insanely beneficial to the ultra rich. Tax cuts for billionaires, deregulations, maximization of corporate profit has been the core of their policies, since Reagan. No real argument here. Show nested quote +To get people that they are actually fucking in the ass to vote for them, they have exploited the resentment of the working class to the “other”. You are in the shit because of the black welfare queens, or because Mexican take your jobs. Your community is falling apart because of the trans, or because of the liberal elites on the coast.
That’s not original. The far right does that here. Billionaire Bolloré owns a gigantic proportion of the media in France, and uses his empire to hammer into people’s head that wage stagnate because the Arabs are stealing our jobs, not because people like him are hoarding the growth of this country. I just have to break with you hard here. You're also exploiting the resentment of the rich to get an economic lower class to blame them (instead of, say, immigrants, a poor justice system and crime policing, a bad education system, economically-destructive policies, bad left-wing policies in general). The manipulation is just the reverse side of the same coin. You simply personally believe you're right (hopefully, you persuasively argue that you're right and they're wrong). That's why I put you in that center chair, and you're pointing at two working-class voters, and you're telling them that the rich are to blame for their problems. The words you used in the first post spectacularly carry the message that you're envious and hateful. You may not feel that it's true of you in your heart (of cold hard facts), but it's how the message carries to the audience. That's why I also talk about it as a disconnect. The messaging is disconnected from the audience and I'm pointing out the reasons why. Show nested quote +You are the only one who think this is controversial. There is nothing Marxist there. You're better off saying it's right despite being overt Marxist false consciousness. The working class (proletariat) is being exploited by the rich elite (bourgeoisie), but the exploited class has been politically manipulated to hold beliefs and values that work against their true class interests. That's pure Engels false consciousness. Practical TL.net posters, who believe themselves quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some (historical thinkers). It's always the other guy that's stuck in some rehashed bunkum from Reagan, and never ourselves!
I’m not the one who wrote about rich people brains being broken.
It’s not two sides of the same coin, because the rise of inequalities and the captation of the growth by a tiny clique of extremely rich people is just a fact.
The blacks / muslims / queer / jew / arabs being responsible for your problems is not. It’s fear, and base instincts exploited to serve an interest.
And again there is no envy. Billionaires are parasites and i despise people who are comfortable living in obscene opulence while most of humanity barely gets by. The world would be a much better place without them. But i would REALLY not want to be one of them. My life is a thousand times better than theirs and I don’t need a stratospheric amount of money, an army of people serving me, yachts and private jets to fill the void inside.
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Left-wingers are dominating primaries in ways that haven't been seen since before WWII, unionization is up even during the most labor-hostile government since Reagan, data center protests explicitly framed as being about "billionaires guzzling your electricity & water to power the AI that will take your job" are so wildly successful they're getting Trump supporters to show up, I could go on.
Please, pontificate more to us about what the working class really wants. Speak on their behalf instead of looking at their actions.
Some people will see children dying of preventable illnesses because their parents couldn't afford health insurance and think, "what do I have to change in the world so this never happens again?" And some people watch it happen and think, "oh no, I hope the billionaires are ok." It's clear one side is rotted to the core by envy, but it ain't the first group.
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I think you overestimate the machiavellic nature of billionaires. They are vile because they operate in the medium of other high power entities and try to safeguard (and expand) their wealth. Coincidentally because many of them operate in the zero sum game the consequences of their actions (disproportionaly hit the social classes under them.
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On July 10 2026 22:00 LightSpectra wrote:
You do your damn hardest every day to defend Epstein customers if that's what it's gotta take to not feel empty inside, my dude. lol.
You know who Epstein customers are? Who has the alleged "Epstein list" and isn't releasing it, the DOJ or LightSpectra?
On July 10 2026 14:51 Fleetfeet wrote:Show nested quote +On July 10 2026 10:27 Razyda wrote:On July 10 2026 07:27 WombaT wrote:
Can’t remember who said it, although it has Kwark vibes, but if some monkey just sat around bossing its peers around, and hoarded all the bananas, the other monkeys would probably end up beating it to death before long. It may be first time when i see someone aspiring to be a monkey... On July 08 2026 15:50 Fleetfeet wrote:On July 08 2026 11:36 WombaT wrote:On July 08 2026 10:43 dyhb wrote:On July 08 2026 10:33 WombaT wrote:On July 08 2026 10:00 dyhb wrote:On July 08 2026 09:41 Billyboy wrote:On July 08 2026 09:37 dyhb wrote:On July 08 2026 09:27 Billyboy wrote:
[quote]
Odd strawman from my post arguing against him dying in a video game.
I did say softcore porn. Hardcore porn would be saying you think Donald Trump should be assassinated prior to leaving office. Actually, transitioning from a video game to a Hollywood drama about the perfect election victory has a narrative rhyme that I missed the first time around. GH is doing what you said, he’s setting up to quote the posts of Sim and Jan, and claim they need to join his revolution or something. The rest of us are just mixing hope and despair. Small election wins in subsequent elections are the kind of progress we need and can use, and big wins are possible if Iran keeps going the way its going and the tariffs keep killing the economy. I think the morose attitude on what a small win will say about America is puerile. On July 08 2026 09:50 WombaT wrote:On July 08 2026 09:37 dyhb wrote:On July 08 2026 09:27 Billyboy wrote:
[quote]
Odd strawman from my post arguing against him dying in a video game.
I did say softcore porn. Hardcore porn would be saying you think Donald Trump should be assassinated prior to leaving office. Actually, transitioning from a video game to a Hollywood drama about the perfect election victory has a narrative rhyme that I missed the first time around. Nonetheless I’m pretty sure Billyboy nor Simberto expressed no such assassination sentiment, so it feels odd to me to throw it out in a direct reply to them. I’ve no such compunctions and I’ll admit to that, the sooner the cunt is out of office the better. Given there are seemingly no limits to what his own party will tolerate, and he’s clearly not going to face censure for his many crimes, death is quite the equaliser, something no person can escape. Would prefer natural causes or a hilarious accident than assassination, which I don’t support. The softcore assassination porn was more directed at you and simberto ("A much better scenario than assassination in minecraft" as an evaluation of degree). To Billy, it appears that his problem with assassination is martyrdom, not assassination. I wholly reject that, I’m in the hardcore assassination porn camp, give me some credit. I don’t think that’s accurate based on Billy’s general posting and what I’ve gleamed from his musing in general. He’s free to speak for himself of course, but contextually I took him to mean ‘assassination is bad, and there may be a martyr effect’, not ‘assassination is bad because there’s a martyr effect’. And to follow your earlier billionaire logic, not sure why it’s bad really. I think the death of a person would be of a benefit for wider society, what’s the problem? If you support any domestic policy or foreign intervention that so much as kills 2 people well, you’re twice as bad as me right off the block. Because you're not the only one on the block with ideas on who in society we should kill in order to make society better off. Perhaps not but my ideas are actually good ones. Facetiousness aside maybe Republicans should have backed impeachment, as they should have if they had any gumption. Instead we’re locked into 4 years of absolutely blatant corruption, with a man who has already skirted his just desserts actively stacking institutions in his favour So I mean you can’t get rid of him via legitimate means, that ain’t happening. So it’s either health issue, assassin or just sitting around watching this certifiable prick fuck around for another few years. I know where my preferences would lie there. Not really sure what the issue is with that really. To steelman dyhb's position, I think the bar being raised to assassinating a sitting president as acceptable political violence, it's important to recognize all the stuff that is beneath that bar which must then also be acceptable political violence. If you're okay with Trump being assassinated, then you'd have to accept Obama being assassinated also. After all, he's just a former president and not the sitting president. I think there's merit to that concern. For myself I'm 'okay with' Trump being assassinated for a reason other than him being a republican president. Someone lost their life savings dumping into trumpcoin and then got rugpulled and wants revenge, or some similar sort of karmic justice for Trump's many moral failings. Less a political assassination, more a personal one. And yeah obviously I'd rather we weren't talking about a sitting president being assassinated, but when he's this brazenly corrupt and the system is powerless to remove him, of course people are gonna talk about other options. Literally what you saying is we need to find excuse. You also failed to identify what below the bar? Surely if it is okay to assassinate president in the name of political reason, then it should be also okay for sitting president to get rid of people advocating assassinating him, in the name of survival? You also failed to identify what below the bar? I never even tried to. If you want to debate the valuation of an attempted assassination on the president and who this allows him to kill, go for it. We can accept that assassinating the sitting president is a pretty high bar and that there's a lot below that bar that would displease people advocating for it. That was my point. Surely if it is okay to assassinate president in the name of political reason, I actually offered that in a hypothetical Trump assassination I would 'be okay' with him being assassinated for personal reasons, not political ones. Even in the hypothetical I'm not okay with him being assassinated for political reasons, so whatever path you took to arrive at believing I said the opposite was dumb and you should take more time figuring it out.
In the example, he is assassinated for personal reasons, i.e. someone lost their life savings on TrumpCoin and took revenge. That's the assassin's motivation.
But political reasons are why YOU'RE okay with it. Unless it was your life savings, maybe someone you know's (who shares at least some responsibility for putting their life savings into a memecoin), it's not personal to you. The reason you are okay with it is political. That's why you're okay with it for him and not for people shooting other memecoin founders. If If it were personal, you would be okay with people shooting them for personal reasons too. You're not. Something's different about Trump. Meaning it's the other stuff that makes you okay with it in his case. Even though it didn't motivate the assassin.
Here's a really clear analogy. Two identical people commit an identical murder, one is black, and one is white. Someone wants the black one to have the death penalty and the white one to have a prison term. He says he deserves execution because the crime was bad. It's a lie. It's because he's black. Otherwise he'd go yeah the white one too. It doesn't matter what he says, he's not credible, the evidence is right there: we can measure it by the fact that he only wants it for the black guy.
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On July 11 2026 00:06 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On July 10 2026 22:00 LightSpectra wrote:
You do your damn hardest every day to defend Epstein customers if that's what it's gotta take to not feel empty inside, my dude. lol. You know who Epstein customers are? Who has the alleged "Epstein list" and isn't releasing it, the DOJ or LightSpectra?
Somebody reboot oBlade, his parser is malfunctioning.
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On July 10 2026 23:47 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On July 10 2026 23:14 dyhb wrote:On July 10 2026 22:20 Biff The Understudy wrote:On July 10 2026 21:42 dyhb wrote:On July 10 2026 17:33 Biff The Understudy wrote:On July 10 2026 04:53 dyhb wrote:On July 10 2026 03:42 Jankisa wrote:On July 10 2026 00:56 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 09 2026 20:54 Jankisa wrote:Zuckerberg and Page did something innovative very early on and most of the money making business that makes their respective companies insanely huge came from acquisitions of other services and websites or from developing of new services within the existing ones, all of that coding and business development was produced by people's labor.
Zuckerberg specifically is really not that good of a coder and his big invention has been stolen from the Winkevi twins.
Some of those people have been handsomely compensated with stock options so they are certainly very rich right now, but they are absolutely nowhere in the neighborhood of $300 billion level rich of those two, and the contributions of those 2 and the value of their labor is not x 1000 or whatever it is as compared to the person who coded Gmail or Youtube.
Also, the whole conversation is not and should not be who deserves how much money, the issue is what do those people use that money and power that comes with it for.
Gates is not perfect but he did help save millions of lives, McKenzie Scott is trying to give away as much of her wealth as she can and she is helping many, and it's an absolute shame that she is out donating people like Page, Musk, Brin, Elison, not only in % of her net worth but also in absolute terms. + Show Spoiler +
These people generated the vast majority of their wealth off of labor of others and by exploiting their customers, creators on their platforms etc., in a just society they would be made to use that money for good, unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions the world has very few just societies, and USA is firmly very close to the bottom of the list of unjust ones.
What is more important than their personal predilections is that NO ONE has donated more than McKenzie Scott has since she divorced Bezos. Despite that, she's got about as much wealth as she did when she started (maybe more, we can't truly know). That speaks to problems so far beyond wealthy individuals and their charity choices that the typical "good guy vs bad guy" (or rather "evil person vs less evil person") political framing can't address. I personally don't like categorizing people into the "evil" category, just broken. I firmly believe that once you reach a certain threshold of wealth the brain of an average human gets broken in a way where they cease to care about anything other then maximizing their wealth and power. It's a competition and letting someone have a bigger number then you is the ultimate defeat, to people who believe they are the best and the smartest losing is the biggest fear in their life, losing 5 % of their wealth is catastrophic, especially since more you have the bigger number those 5 % represent, so they just go insane and become these fucked up embodiment of Capitalism, When some of them reach a threshold where they are so rich they don't know what else to do, like Putin or Trump, they start chasing "history" and we all pay the price for that. When some of them reach a point where their tweets can move markets and they face no consequences for manipulating them, like Musk, they get addicted to that and they want to change the world into what they think it should be. There are, of course, notable exceptions, Warren Buffet, to me, by all extents and proposes seems to be a decent bloke, so it's not all of them, or in the case of Gates, not all of them all of the time, but in general, this kind of wealth really, really fucks you up to the point where you join the Epstein class and you never go back. The most broken ones aren't them, they have been put in extreme circumstances, to me it's their defenders, people who don't really have a lot of adversity in life but have been brainwashed by media and their upbringing into thinking that accumulation of Capital is the ultimate goal of civilization, and as you can see form this thread they are very passionate about defending these other broken individuals because they have been convinced, basically like this: The cartoon rich guy manipulating the working class to blame an immigrant certainly makes this post humorous. Is this a satire of Marxist class consciousness, or an actual good-faith proposal? The entire post needs an Orwell caption directly below Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred—a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacuo hatred—against the exploiters. Blaming the immigrants / the blacks / the libs to convince working class Americans to vote against their interests and for the bottom line a class of ultra rich donors has literally been the whole agenda of the GOP since Reagan, but I’m not surprised you didn’t notice. It's also a pretty clever dodge when you're actually out of touch with working class interests, and are now a party of a highly-educated laptop class serving their own interests. The man at a table telling people what to think is the modern Democratic campaign consultant, and his message to the working class is that they're too poor, too uneducated, and too easily manipulated to actually know what's good for them. The sales pitch was doomed to fail. A sane party has to keep the middle class socialists in check. Bill Clinton did this with an authentic "I feel your pain" pitch and his understanding of Arkansas voters, and Obama did it with skillful broad-based oration for as long as he could. The same problem in Orwell's time resurfaced. You don't give a damn about the actual lives of less fortunate families than your own. You're just envious of the rich and burn with hatred for them. Connection to the family struggles brought on by gas prices and tariffs play second fiddle to how evil Elon is for making so much money and boy do we have to punish these rich and successful guys for having so much wealth and power! It's toxic. Granted, I believe some of you realize this at a deep level, but feel like doubling down is the only choice left available. I have zero envy for the rich and especially not someone like Elon. I have an amazing life, and he seems like a really miserable fuck. And tacky superyachts don’t inspire me. We live in an economic order that is broken to the benefits of a very few and at the expense of most folks. It’s just a fact that wages and quality of life has stagnated or declined for most people while a very small minority is getting exponentially richer. Those folks have a ridiculous amount of political power, finance politicians, and own most of the media. Again there is no conspiracy here, it’s a cold fact. This post is an improvement to your prior posts. Do you understand that "once you reach a certain threshold of wealth the brain of an average human gets broken" " they cease to care about anything other then maximizing their wealth and power" "people who believe they are the best and the smartest losing is the biggest fear in their life" " they get addicted to that" means you will fail to dodge the reasonable conclusion that you're driven by envy and hatred of the rich. We hear about the reverse in the popular media all the time: They're defending billionaires (how weird!), they're bootlickers, etc. They, like you, will protest that it's just economic cold, hard facts. Do they, like you, get out of jail free with that excuse? Now, the GOP havs had a platform that is insanely beneficial to the ultra rich. Tax cuts for billionaires, deregulations, maximization of corporate profit has been the core of their policies, since Reagan. No real argument here. To get people that they are actually fucking in the ass to vote for them, they have exploited the resentment of the working class to the “other”. You are in the shit because of the black welfare queens, or because Mexican take your jobs. Your community is falling apart because of the trans, or because of the liberal elites on the coast.
That’s not original. The far right does that here. Billionaire Bolloré owns a gigantic proportion of the media in France, and uses his empire to hammer into people’s head that wage stagnate because the Arabs are stealing our jobs, not because people like him are hoarding the growth of this country. I just have to break with you hard here. You're also exploiting the resentment of the rich to get an economic lower class to blame them (instead of, say, immigrants, a poor justice system and crime policing, a bad education system, economically-destructive policies, bad left-wing policies in general). The manipulation is just the reverse side of the same coin. You simply personally believe you're right (hopefully, you persuasively argue that you're right and they're wrong). That's why I put you in that center chair, and you're pointing at two working-class voters, and you're telling them that the rich are to blame for their problems. The words you used in the first post spectacularly carry the message that you're envious and hateful. You may not feel that it's true of you in your heart (of cold hard facts), but it's how the message carries to the audience. That's why I also talk about it as a disconnect. The messaging is disconnected from the audience and I'm pointing out the reasons why. You are the only one who think this is controversial. There is nothing Marxist there. You're better off saying it's right despite being overt Marxist false consciousness. The working class (proletariat) is being exploited by the rich elite (bourgeoisie), but the exploited class has been politically manipulated to hold beliefs and values that work against their true class interests. That's pure Engels false consciousness. Practical TL.net posters, who believe themselves quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some (historical thinkers). It's always the other guy that's stuck in some rehashed bunkum from Reagan, and never ourselves! I’m not the one who wrote about rich people brains being broken. Since you've replied to my reply to Jankisa, please feel free to differentiate your own thinking from his. I told him the Orwell quote that I think his post is an excellent illustration of, but maybe you agree with me in regards to that segment of his post. You chose to only voice disagreement with me.
It’s not two sides of the same coin, because the rise of inequalities and the captation of the growth by a tiny clique of extremely rich people is just a fact.
The blacks / muslims / queer / jew / arabs being responsible for your problems is not. It’s fear, and base instincts exploited to serve an interest.
And again there is no envy. Billionaires are parasites and i despise people who are comfortable living in obscene opulence while most of humanity barely gets by. The world would be a much better place without them. But i would REALLY not want to be one of them. My life is a thousand times better than theirs and I don’t need a stratospheric amount of money, an army of people serving me, yachts and private jets to fill the void inside. Let me get this straight from your last three posts. A tiny clique of extremely rich people are responsible for problems of the working class, but high rates of immigration are not. You are not manipulating people to believe that a tiny clique of extremely rich people are the source of their problems, but other people are most definitely manipulating people to believe that immigration is the source of their problems.
Billionaires are parasites and you despise rich people. You also aren't envious and hateful of rich people.
I sincerely doubt that you could convince a teenager that you hold all those views seriously in a self-aware manner, much less a grown adult. In fact, I'd use your statements to test if a child can differentiate between fact and opinion.
Person A says that the problems of the working class are primarily due to a tiny clique of extremely rich people that bear responsibility for the decline in their wages and quality of life, but they have manipulated the government and media to put the blame on immigrants and things other than themselves.
Person B says that the problems of the working class are primarily due to large-scale immigration and an out-of-touch educated elite that are driving down wages and quality of life, but that a group of people like Person A seek to instead put the blame on a tiny clique of extremely rich people.
Which of those two statements are statements of fact? Which of those two statements are statements of opinion?
You're so out of touch that if you existed as a prominent American Democrat, then Republicans would have good cause to paste your quotes in a campaign ad. My opinions are facts, and your opinions are manipulation? Yes, every person on planet earth thinks that cold, hard facts are the foundation for their opinions. It's always the other guy whose opinions are in conflict with the facts. Who are you trying to fool by claiming otherwise? You obviously are intelligent enough to possess the capacity to separate facts like inequality and low-skilled immigration from opinions like what should change about society in order to improve the quality of life for working class people and how/to what extent society is broken and who bears ultimate responsibility. I could pretend it's a fact that you possess too much hubris to communicate realistic left-wing policy to a disillusioned working class person, but that's actually just my opinion. My opinion is born out of talking to too many progressive Democrats that pretend their shit don't stink, and it's probably unfairly influenced by my interactions with them.
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EPT![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/pK8qHXE.png)
