On December 05 2024 00:29 Uldridge wrote: The idea that oBlade gets at, if I'm interpreting this correctly at least, is that majority groups get lumped together and get disproportionately less time of day at the moment because all the minority groups are fighting and getting their place in the sun. Meanwhile, rural people who's price of eggs and bread have gone through the roof are told to shut up and get by if they complain about their current situation. This is what the lens of diversity brings us. How do we elevate singular percentages of the population out of their problems when large percentages won't be lifted out of their problems because their perspective doesn't matter because they belong to the majority at the moment so their problems need to take a backseat. It's not about the white powerful rich patriarchal maintaining man, it's about the frail, poor, opportunity poor white trailer park man. Do we actually make a subdivision for this case? Or for all the other disenfranchised or less-opportunistic people? I'm not saying you're doing that, I'm not even saying the entire framework of diversity and inclusion is doing that - in fact, I'd say they're trying to incorporate that. What I am saying is that this seems, to me at least, to be the narrative that's playing with large amounts of people that have voted for Trump and there needs to be a narrative shift that heavily emphasises that they're also included.
Since I have experience with rural rightwing white people I can tell you that this isn't exactly how most of them think, at least in Europe. They understand that the left aims to lift everyone, they just think that it can't be done, and that we're going to fail. Provided that we're going to fail, the system in which they aren't lifted up is going to remain, and they think that given that data it's better for them if there are other identities of people that are lower than them in the hierarchy.
Which, let's face it, none of this reasoning is incorrect. The only problem is that there's no reason that the left can't win, it has happened before, it doesn't break any of the rules of reality, so there's no reason to have this thought as a starting point.
Rural poor Americans may have a different view in that they equate the left and liberals, and of course liberals aren't trying to lift them up. I could see it. But we also need to mention that, you know, it's not uncommon that when we see a "rural poor", both in the US and in Europe, we see some guy with a good car and a house that he owns, who maybe owns a business or maybe makes like 100000$ a year, talking about how he's so mad that the immigrants are getting all the help while he's struggling.
On December 05 2024 00:29 Uldridge wrote: The idea that oBlade gets at, if I'm interpreting this correctly at least, is that majority groups get lumped together and get disproportionately less time of day at the moment because all the minority groups are fighting and getting their place in the sun. Meanwhile, rural people who's price of eggs and bread have gone through the roof are told to shut up and get by if they complain about their current situation. This is what the lens of diversity brings us. How do we elevate singular percentages of the population out of their problems when large percentages won't be lifted out of their problems because their perspective doesn't matter because they belong to the majority at the moment so their problems need to take a backseat. It's not about the white powerful rich patriarchal maintaining man, it's about the frail, poor, opportunity poor white trailer park man. Do we actually make a subdivision for this case? Or for all the other disenfranchised or less-opportunistic people? I'm not saying you're doing that, I'm not even saying the entire framework of diversity and inclusion is doing that - in fact, I'd say they're trying to incorporate that. What I am saying is that this seems, to me at least, to be the narrative that's playing with large amounts of people that have voted for Trump and there needs to be a narrative shift that heavily emphasises that they're also included.
None of that is what oBlade is talking about. oBlade's and Musk's complaints truly were as one-dimensional as they seem: "cis-gendered" is an inappropriate and taboo word that shouldn't be used, according to them.
Talks of other disenfranchised groups, such as the struggles that large swaths of rural families encounter, are absolutely valuable conversations. That requires a discussion about socioeconomic status - and perhaps is more relevant in the US Politics thread. That's not what oBlade and Musk were referring to. Furthermore, we might use words such as "working-class" and "middle-class" families, which would be offensive to oBlade because using words to identify different groups of people would be "to differentiate that person as well, meaning exclude (or a leftist would say "other"), meaning it's pointless except as a pejorative". Edit: "Rural" must also be a bad word, too, when used to describe certain families, since many families are non-rural! See how stupid this is?
Despite what Marx's apostles may have us believe, "middle-class" is not a protected characteristic someone is born into that everybody can see within 0.01 seconds of looking at someone's appearance. However, yes, it's ignorant, nonproductive, antisocial nonsense to go around just calling people things, for example "billionaire Elon Musk."
On December 05 2024 02:08 Uldridge wrote: How do you have experience with rural white Europeans? Your line of work or where you grew up?
Grew up in a village yeah. The place I live in now is larger, like 9k people, but also the largest town around here is at 40k so all of it probably still qualifies as rural to some extent. Overall the place is mostly left on economics and mostly center right on social issues.
On December 05 2024 00:29 Uldridge wrote: The idea that oBlade gets at, if I'm interpreting this correctly at least, is that majority groups get lumped together and get disproportionately less time of day at the moment because all the minority groups are fighting and getting their place in the sun. Meanwhile, rural people who's price of eggs and bread have gone through the roof are told to shut up and get by if they complain about their current situation. This is what the lens of diversity brings us. How do we elevate singular percentages of the population out of their problems when large percentages won't be lifted out of their problems because their perspective doesn't matter because they belong to the majority at the moment so their problems need to take a backseat. It's not about the white powerful rich patriarchal maintaining man, it's about the frail, poor, opportunity poor white trailer park man. Do we actually make a subdivision for this case? Or for all the other disenfranchised or less-opportunistic people? I'm not saying you're doing that, I'm not even saying the entire framework of diversity and inclusion is doing that - in fact, I'd say they're trying to incorporate that. What I am saying is that this seems, to me at least, to be the narrative that's playing with large amounts of people that have voted for Trump and there needs to be a narrative shift that heavily emphasises that they're also included.
None of that is what oBlade is talking about. oBlade's and Musk's complaints truly were as one-dimensional as they seem: "cis-gendered" is an inappropriate and taboo word that shouldn't be used, according to them.
Talks of other disenfranchised groups, such as the struggles that large swaths of rural families encounter, are absolutely valuable conversations. That requires a discussion about socioeconomic status - and perhaps is more relevant in the US Politics thread. That's not what oBlade and Musk were referring to. Furthermore, we might use words such as "working-class" and "middle-class" families, which would be offensive to oBlade because using words to identify different groups of people would be "to differentiate that person as well, meaning exclude (or a leftist would say "other"), meaning it's pointless except as a pejorative". Edit: "Rural" must also be a bad word, too, when used to describe certain families, since many families are non-rural! See how stupid this is?
Despite what Marx's apostles may have us believe, "middle-class" is not a protected characteristic someone is born into that everybody can see within 0.01 seconds of looking at someone's appearance. However, yes, it's ignorant, nonproductive, antisocial nonsense to go around just calling people things, for example "billionaire Elon Musk."
It’s an entirely pertinent observation given that it’s solely the whole billionaire thing that say, enables him to buy a platform such as Twitter
On December 05 2024 02:08 Uldridge wrote: How do you have experience with rural white Europeans? Your line of work or where you grew up?
Grew up in a village yeah. The place I live in now is larger, like 9k people, but also the largest town around here is at 40k so all of it probably still qualifies as rural to some extent. Overall the place is mostly left on economics and mostly center right on social issues.
What do you think are the reasons they think more left leaning policy would fail?
On December 05 2024 02:08 Uldridge wrote: How do you have experience with rural white Europeans? Your line of work or where you grew up?
Grew up in a village yeah. The place I live in now is larger, like 9k people, but also the largest town around here is at 40k so all of it probably still qualifies as rural to some extent. Overall the place is mostly left on economics and mostly center right on social issues.
What do you think are the reasons they think more left leaning policy would fail?
I don't know what they would answer, it's a good question. But I mean, it's not like I don't see the issues. The left has less power, less money, less influence. In the current system we're underdogs for sure, by far even. And their mindset is usually more individualistic, so they might only consider solutions that work on an individual level, they might need something that they can directly do, themselves, to make the left succeed, and clearly there is no such thing.
On December 05 2024 04:51 rich- wrote: This is the most cringe thread I've clicked on in ages.
Might have something to do with Elon being the cringiest fascism supporter I've ever seen.
Not as cringe as some of his fanboys. Although it’s a tight competition
It’s just Trump 2.0 at this point, it’s seemingly impossible to even get an ‘I’m overall still positively inclined on Musk but his cis policy does seem to go against his stated free speech absolutism, fair enough’.
On December 07 2024 02:42 WombaT wrote: So Musk is tweeting about buying Hasbro now as he didn’t like some sensitivity-minded DnD prefaces, apparently.
Wonder if he’s at all serious or just venting on this one
I kinda like what Musk is doing here. He is clearly showing that with enough money, you can buy literally anything.
Don't like a thing? Just buy the company and change it! Don't like the politics of something? Just buy it and change it.
I think it is kinda important that people realize just how much influence billionaires have. They can change literally anything to be whatever they want, for whatever reason. The insane thing is that they are not beholden to normal mechanics. Normal people, when buying a company, need to make sure the company still works and is profitable. That limits what you can do with it. Not so if you are a billionaire. Twitter doesn't need to be profitable, you can just buy it and use it as a propaganda machine. If it loses money, who cares. You have infinite money anyways.
And if you don't like a thing in DnD, you can just buy the company and change whatever you want. Doesn't need to be good, doesn't need to make a profit afterwards either. Just use your money to get whatever you want.
Now, sane people, when they don't like something in DnD, they just ignore it, or play a different game. But if you are a billionaire, those rules no longer apply.
On December 07 2024 02:42 WombaT wrote: So Musk is tweeting about buying Hasbro now as he didn’t like some sensitivity-minded DnD prefaces, apparently.
Wonder if he’s at all serious or just venting on this one
I kinda like what Musk is doing here. He is clearly showing that with enough money, you can buy literally anything.
Don't like a thing? Just buy the company and change it! Don't like the politics of something? Just buy it and change it.
I think it is kinda important that people realize just how much influence billionaires have. They can change literally anything to be whatever they want, for whatever reason. The insane thing is that they are not beholden to normal mechanics. Normal people, when buying a company, need to make sure the company still works and is profitable. That limits what you can do with it. Not so if you are a billionaire. Twitter doesn't need to be profitable, you can just buy it and use it as a propaganda machine. If it loses money, who cares. You have infinite money anyways.
And if you don't like a thing in DnD, you can just buy the company and change whatever you want. Doesn't need to be good, doesn't need to make a profit afterwards either. Just use your money to get whatever you want.
Now, sane people, when they don't like something in DnD, they just ignore it, or play a different game. But if you are a billionaire, those rules no longer apply.
Musk does good work in teaching this to people.
A very salient point, most billionaires go under the radar, some have a bit of exposure through philanthropy or political activism, but this is different again.
I often struggle trying to sell my ‘billionaires should not exist’ line of thinking to skeptics, and aside from inequity a big component of that is quite how much power they have.
Musk seems to be falling over himself to give me more concrete examples of it, so in a way I thank him for that. He much more visibly wields and illuminates the extent of that power.
I wonder if it has made some people reconsider their stance on what such a staggering discrepancy of wealth actually looks like and what that means. Would be curious to find out if some attitudes have changed!
Furthermore to that point, and what beautifully illustrates the kind of barrier we’re talking about.
What if on a collective basis DnD’s fandom wanted to buy out Hasbro?
Let’s arbitrarily say we get a million fans. They’d still need to contribute thousands each, something some simply can’t afford. Others maybe can but they’d be digging deep into their pockets to do so.
Obviously logistically it would be a nightmare too, but sidestepping that. A million regular folks have less ability to enact change in this domain than one bloke and his whims. Or blokette!
We’ve seen this in a much lower scale in English football, some clubs were saved from going to the wall by going fan owned, and (logistics aside) many wanted to keep that system. But once their clubs recovered and moved up the leagues they simply couldn’t afford to keep the club competitive and had to sell to benefactors or companies.
Delaware judge AGAIN blocked Musk's all-or-nothing stock compensation plan. Approved in 2018 by 73% of shares, it was also re-approved this year by 84% of shares after being voted on to verify that shareholders were not bamboozled into. The judge in the case insists it's not "fair." He may have taken the company from $50 billion to $1.25 trillion and from 250k cars a year to 1.8 million cars a year in that time, but come on. People shouldn't just be allowed to vote for how a person is compensated to do a job, when there's good old fashioned judges walking around who will never become billionaires.
At the time, McCormick ruled in favor of the main shareholder in the suit who challenged the package, arguing that Musk and the Tesla board “bore the burden of proving that the compensation plan was fair, and they failed to meet their burden.”
What IS fair:
Awarding the lawyers of a guy who owned 9 shares $345 million because he protected Tesla shareholders from the unfairness that they have been too stupid to see twice despite voting for it even more lopsidedly as shareholders.
Snapshot of Elon Musk, our Lord and Savior, smiling to himself while knowingly spreading lies to deliberately fuck over Americans:
Elon lied again. Several times. Big lies. The victims of his lies are once again Americans of all backgrounds, especially the lower class. No improved healthcare for you, get wrecked by the glorious Elon. He's circumventing democracy to bend everyone over and I'll kindly spare you the rest of the graphical depiction.
1) "He alleged that the plan included a 40% raise for lawmakers. But the maximum pay increase possible through the proposal would have been 3.8%"
2) "Musk also shared a post from another user that falsely claimed the bill provided $3 billion in funding for a potential new stadium for the NFL’s Washington Commanders, commenting: “This should not be funded by your tax dollars!” " [...] "However, no such funding is provided by the bill."
3) "In a third post, Musk incorrectly claimed that “We’re funding bioweapon labs in this bill!”
The plan provided funds for up to 12 regional biocontainment research laboratories, not facilities for creating bioweapons."
And more news on our Dear Leader Elon's quest for fascism. He just endorsed the AfD, the German Neo-Nazi party which has been strongly on the rise, sitting at number one/two in popularity. This is of course not surprising, as he's previously expressed support for other fascist/far-right parties.
Not only did he endorse them, he also explicitly speaks of the AfD "saving Germany". Saving Germany from what you may ask? Well, there's one clue as he later referred to Scholz as a "fool" and called for his resignation. He also shared a tweet from a user calling the Magdeburg attack a direct consequence of illegal mass migration.
It seems like you're all misunderstanding the far right 'fascism' uprising. The reason they're becoming popular is because there's a big issue. Not because everything is going swimmingly. You don't need an appeal to authoritarianism or populism or large overhauls or paradigm shift when life is chugging along. People feel unsafe and unheard. Whether facts map onto experience 1:1 is not important at all. Experiences = facts especially for humans. See 10 brown people and the cities are swarming with immigrants. See one of them rolling around in an expensive car and they must be stealing tax money, or rather, the government is using tax money to give immigrant unrightful amounts of money so they get a huge lead on the natives.
Sadly, the rhetoric is corrosive and needlessly antagonistic. However, how would you feel of you've seen your situation deteriorate relative to other in society with no fault of your own. You've just been living your life, doing your grocieries and doing your job. How is it somehow worst than 10 - 20 years ago?
Btw: I'm not agreeing with their conclusions or with their rhetoric at all. I'm saying simple people come to unfounded conclusions based on flawed analysis. They need a better alternative and the left isn't seemingly offering one. I'm trying to find understanding for why these movement became the way they became so that we can start countering it effectively.
EPT
![[image loading]](https://mcdn.wallpapersafari.com/medium/35/51/bSz2mD.jpg)
