The United States is the national embodiment of schadenfreude.
Mistakes/failures WILL be mocked and met with cruelty, unless of course you come from enough wealth to be bailed out, in which case you're "so brave" and "aspirational" for putting yourself out there, trying new things, and learning from failure. Again, ONLY if you're already wealthy, otherwise you deserve your suffering, and why aren't you suffering more, you fuck up making bad decisons?! 🇺🇸
Jack Welch, former GE CEO and current free gravestone urinal had a lot to do with changing corporate culture to completely abandon the pretense of societal responsibility as well.
Research found while antidepressant prescriptions have risen dramatically in the US for teenage girls and women in their 20s, the rate of such prescriptions for young men “declined abruptly during March 2020 and did not recover.”
Contrary to the pretty lies we like to say here in the US, “There’s help if you need it/you matter/don’t be afraid to get help” There are no meaningful resources to help those not attached to meaningful capital, and seeking help will almost certainly leave you with more problems than you started with.
And if you’re a man, you’ll also be ridiculed for it.
We made a society that works against itself to the point that we eagerly send the biggest losers out to die of exposure under a freeway, of course screaming “time out please I give up I need help” isn’t going to end well for you.
I wish at the very least we could be honest with ourselves and cut out the patronizing, cutesy lies that we say to absolve ourselves of the guilt of our society’s cruelty.
I’m just here to provide as as little value as possible without being fired, while my employer tries to exploit as much value out of me as they can without me walking out.
The laborers didn’t set these rigged, antagonistic terms, but failing to game them as a laborer just makes you a fool. Almost no employer is earnest with their employees, and that lack of respect should go both ways.
The market capitalists are more than welcome to restructure their orphan crushing economy into one that rewards the labor that makes their capital over do nothing shareholders demanding mooooaaaaar for nothing, simply because they present chips from their last exploitation casino outing, but we all know they’d rather civilization collapses, because the peasants having enough to do more than subsist would make them feel less wealthy by comparison, and would make their fragile egos cry.
In the two years I've been writing about Americans' changing relationship to work, there's one theme that's come up over and over again: loyalty. Whether my stories are about quiet quitting, or job-hopping, or leveraging a job offer from a competitor to force your boss to give you a raise, readers seem to divide into two groups....
Which is why I scold myself for so much as thinkng about work off hours. I tell my supervisor as much when they ask if I’ve had time to think about a solution to a technical issue.
They’re very A type and I enjoy how much my disdain for the modern business ethos bothers them.
My hatred of the owner class is matched only by my disappointment in my fellow humans for not only taking it, but often defending it.
The people we struggle for have abandoned their humanity. That’s what it takes to be one of society’s supposed winners or be in their good graces: practiced sociopathy.
And half of the peasants fantasize about being the sociopaths instead of ending their reign and this despicable con game of an economy.
Moreover, if all the oligarchs are doing it, and they are, who will be left to buy their products/services?
They’re breaking their own ponzi scheme economy for a few more quarterly profit boosts because there’s nowhere else to grow/metastasize. Media companies are making less media. Food makers are making less product types. Their profit is coming out of gutting workers and their ability to produce what their economic sector produced in the first place.
This is a terminal stage market capitalism fire sale. The snake is eating its own tail having conquered the board.
I’m not for people only interested in benefiting themselves being the ones rewarded most by society, let alone being the ones effectively in charge of society as they are.
It isn’t heroic, benevolent, or even minimally pro-social to spend your life trying to accrue private profit for the sake of private profit. It just makes you greedy and selfish. Or as they call it with their orwellian language manipulation, “rational self-interest.” being greedy, selfish, and unconcerned with the effects your actions have on others makes you a vile, broken, contemptible person, and humanity seems to have forgotten that entirely, or at least we’ve been propagandized to forget it by the owner class.
We punish people that dare to pursue vocations that benefit society, like teachers and paramedics, and reward selfishness.
I can’t root for my own species in this state. Slitting eachother’s throats when there’s another dollar to be had by it. If this is truly what our species has chosen as it’s most practiced purpose and meaning, I want no part of it, and I will be grateful when it’s time to leave it.
Most of us without meaningful capital are either forced to do it in practice with our labor, or be cast out to serve the owners in another way: as capitalist scarecrows. Our homeless exist on purpose, it wouldn’t be that expensive to provide minimal shelter. They exist to die slowly and publicly of exposure, and constant police capital defense force harassment, to terrify the capital batteries into continuing to show up to their jobs to produce value for their owners.
One way or another, those without capital are forced to serve the owners. Nothing “voluntary” about modern market capitalism, short of slitting one’s own throat.
You will serve the owner’s insatiable greed directly, or you will serve as an example and threat to the others.
And that’s how the owners control us in perpetuity.
Blue collar vs white collar.
The homed vs the homeless for lowering their property values.
Red vs blue and the race wars too.
Etc.
There are only 3,000 billionaires on Earth. Extrapolate that down to people with triple digit millions in net worth, about 28,000 people on Earth worth more than 100 million, and you’ve found humanity’s common enemies manipulating us into beating one another down when not making them more money.
Our common enemies are tiny in number, a few tens of thousands lording over billions, but they manipulate us into fighting each other.
I don’t disagree, but they are a symptom, not the root issue.
But hey, nevermind. I think they stole a few of our cookies. Some guy in a suit sitting on a mountain of cookies yelled down to warn me about them. Great guy, think his name was Warren.
Right, but there’s no term for being greedy, sociopathic, or engaging in hoarding in economics.
They fall under Orwellian double speak terms that make them complimentary, “rational self-interest, creating externalities, curtailing redundancies” etc. Language designed to turn their sins into their achievements.
Considering the central prominence of greed in our economy, it’s a glaring ommission that the capitalists and economists themselves seem to have forgotten that word, or to create an economic term for greed that isn’t complimentary.
They are driven almost entirely by insatiable greed, yet the term is never uttered in their earnings reports or economic news.
They seem to want the concept of greed as the pejorative it is to be forgotten entirely, despite it demonstrably being their core value.
“But I go to work so it isn’t faiiiiiiir if they don’t die in the gutter!”
-Someone struggling to make rent/mortgage, and having 95% of the value they produce extracted to run up the ego scores of our con-men owners.
They propagandize us through the media they own, and the curriculum they influence, to look down and to the side for who to blame, because our benevolent job creators would never work against us, would they? It’s in-fucking-sane.
Janikka Perry never made it home from her shift at the bakery of a supercenter in Arkansas. She was one of many Walmart workers who have been pressured to work through illness or pain, sometimes with devastating consequences.
The people that profit off killing workers like Jannikka didn’t know her name when she was making them money, and won’t care to know her name after having killed her.
This “society” is nothing more than a playground for sociopaths. Our very lives are in service to those sociopaths that don’t consider us human solely because we lack the significant net worth they hoard and gamble without any consideration beyond “what’s in it for me?”
Remember that the next time you recoil at a homeless victim of this system. That is one of us that our society beat into that position for failing to produce for our owners. Most of the peasants look at them the way our owner class looks at us.
The homeless aren’t our enemy, the government that has been corrupted to serve the owners isn’t our enemy, our neighbors aren’t our enemy. Wall Street and the global market capitalist owner class are our civilization’s and planet’s common enemy, whether we choose to actually fight them or continue to submit to and profit them like good little doggies. Everything else is a distraction, and likely a distraction of their design meant to keep us divided punching sideways and downward instead of looking up.
A UN poverty expert called on the CEOs of Amazon, DoorDash and Walmart on Tuesday to address allegations that wages at the US-based corporations are trapping workers in poverty, forcing them to rely on US Government benefits to survive.
This person is calling our rigged market capitalism silicon valley for some reason.
Silicon valley is just another symptom of letting our oligarchs run the table unopposed. Just another place to spread the sanctioned insatiable greed tumor the Ronald Reagans and Jack Welches let loose half a century ago in the name of cannibalizing society for short term profit.
If you wanted to attack something, attack the markets they trade on, run by shareholders that demand maximum short term profit at literally any and all societal expense. We won’t do shit to anyone mind you, they’re in charge, but I have just as much disdain for Warren Buffett as I do for Mark Zuckerberg.
All billionaires and triple digit millionaires are socially destructive, exploiting workers, buying their own regulators, and robbing commons, the coast they live on and whether they wear shiny shoes or sandals and socks as they inflict cruelty on their fellow man for moooooooore profit is irrelevant.
What it does is eliminate and prevent most causes of human unhappiness, and practically all unhappiness based in meeting basic human needs.
And I’m sorry, but daddy not being proud of you or mommy dying young when you have means doesn’t equate to the misery of rooting through a dumpster out of hunger or having a pig kick you out of an underpass into the rain to die of exposure.
Having what you want is nice, but it doesn’t replace connection.
I say, this as someone who can’t afford what they want and sometimes even need. Having enough money is the hardest checkbox to happiness, but material possession alone isn’t the only ingredient unless you’re truly a clinical sociopath.
Modern Democrats are the ones that game theorize themselves into complete indolence.
Modern Republicans, on the other hand, are like that scorpion from The Scorpion and the Frog. All they know how to do is blindly attack, and in their echo chamber of the house, where they had the power to preemptively sideline their enemies, of course they start stinging each other. It’s all Republicans went there to do: attack, tear down, destroy.
Just ask Bohner and Ryan, the last 2 appointed scorpion wranglers.
Just for context, if you made 100k a year, an extremely enviable salary, and saved every penny somehow, you’d be a billionaire in exactly TEN THOUSAND YEARS.
No one can earn a billion dollars through honest labor and the sweat of their brow. It must be exploited out of others. It must be stolen. You cannot possess a billion dollars and be a decent human being. For any good you do, you can’t approach the harm you’ve already inflicted upon others in the name of insatiable greed.
Oh I’m sorry, they’ve used their wealth to warp the culture and language to their benefit, so greed doesn’t exist anymore. I meant “rational self-interest.” also we have always been at war with Eurasia.
I think you underestimate the propaganda influence they have. I don’t consider it voluntary by most, any more than I blame a North Korean citizen for hating the west as they’ve been indoctrinated to do, it’s the fault of the power above them.
The power above us isn’t our purchased government, it’s capital. And it propagandizes us to defend this system from Kindergarten to colleges of economics to the for profit news they own. And if that doesn’t work, they control the means of state violence through the government and both major parties they fully own and control to defend their profits and interests against the peasants. We aren’t approaching Orwellian society, we’ve surpassed it. Legions of peasants advocate directly against their own interests because thats what all of us are taught to do, you have to buck that pressure to even truly open your eyes and know whats going on.
If President Biden loses his bid for re-election, a key factor will be the widespread perception that the economy is doing badly on his watch. Poll after poll shows Americans rating economic conditions as very bad and giving Biden very low approval for his economic management....
Wall Street is doing great. Our oligarchs are doing great. Non-wealthy people are not, because the ones making more than they need own our government and have warped our economy into their personal poggy bank.
Leave it to the New York Times to get pissed off that the peasants aren’t vicariously celebrating their owner’s victories.
Of course the New York Times talks about people who don’t own meaningful capital positions as if they were the livestock of those that do, so it’s no surprise.
Wall Street is doing great. Our oligarchs are doing great. Non-wealthy people are not, because the ones making more than they need own our government and have warped our economy into their personal poggy bank.
Leave it to the New York Times to get pissed off that the peasants aren’t vicariously celebrating their owner’s victories.
Of course the New York Times talks about people who don’t own meaningful capital positions as if they were the livestock of those that do, so it’s no surprise.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a prominent member of Congress and leading voice of the American left, has called on the US government to issue an apology to Latin American countries for decades of meddling in their affairs and causing instability in the region....
Reminder: AOC was a spoiler candidate, because the DNC and the RNC are arms of our capitalist owner class. Someone who says the truths she says aren’t permitted to climb the ladder within our fully purchased party duopoly.
If the destabilization of socialist regimes through sanctions and political assassinations weren’t enough to convince you that our nation is just another geopolitical baddie, you’re hopeless.
We’re better than North Korea, Russia, and China, but that bar is pathetic. For too many, being better than the absolute worst is just license to rationalize cruelty and punch down.
George Carlin knew exactly why decades ago. No one noticed. No one cared.
“There’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.
Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want.
Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that.
You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”
-George Carlin
good bit. everybody laugh. roll on snare drum. curtains
Fortunately, I also believe he was correct about the natural world, that’s been through far worse than us, ramping up to retaliate against us and shake us off like a bad case of fleas, so maybe it’ll all get set back to zero and nature can start again once it corrects our little evolutionary cul-de-sac.
Red states are suffering brain drain, and not just in Idaho. Doctors are packing up and leaving states like Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia, and more....
What? Republicans aren’t satisfied having surgery performed on them by fellow Right-wingers who got their doctorate at the College of Common Sense and did their surgical residency at the Can-Do-Attitude Hospital?
I thought academia in general was a leftist plot to turn kids lgbtq that you wanted to burn to the ground?
Justice Clarence Thomas disclosed Thursday that Republican megadonor Harlan Crow paid for private jet trips for Thomas in 2022 to attend a speech in Texas and a vacation at Crow’s luxurious New York estate, as ethics questions continue to rock the Supreme Court....
After the most recent revelations, Thomas’s defenders have gone conspicuously silent. Organs like National Review and conservative legal apparatchik Ed Whelan, who loudly dismissed evidence of wrongdoing by Thomas, have had nothing to say about Thomas’s many billionaire patrons....
Our owners and their paid managers in the Courts, in the Congress, and both major parties have reached the point where rhetorical defense is no longer relevant.
We’ve reached the “So what if I did? Want to cry about it?” stage of this collapse.
You see it everywhere. Corporations used to do damage control after mass layoffs, now they literally insult the employees on the way out the door and brag about their cruelty on the money shows.
The small sect of our society that are in the country club no longer fear consequences, and for good reason, as they’ve captured any governmental bodies that would earnestly seek or inflict them. And if that fails, they still have legions of deluded, self-hating peasants ready to protect their own oppressors out of the sunk cost fallacy.
I’ll vote for Biden, just like the people on the Titanic turned on the water pumps. It might buy slightly more time. Maybe.
Lets not pretend though that either of our only 2 parties, Neoliberal and Fascist, are going to improve our worsening situation.
All we’re voting for is the rate of collapse. At the end of the day, the people who bribe both parties need to be checked to do that. And that’s clearly not going to happen. So collapse is inevitable.
Former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi wasn't happy after watching Republicans grill FBI director Christopher Wray in the House Wednesday. While Democrats questioned Wray for ignoring warnings about Jan. 6, Republicans sought answers to a slew of conspiracy theories and culture war grievances that go a...
Union leader endorsing Biden: ‘We’re not gonna waste a lot of time’ on Trump supporters ( thehill.com )
Advocacy groups say Texas inmates are 'being cooked to death' in state prisons without air conditioning ( www.usatoday.com )
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14643177...
Somebody do something. Somebody? ( lemmy.world )
'Boys are disappearing' from mental health care, as signs of depression and anxiety go undetected ( www.nbcnews.com )
Research found while antidepressant prescriptions have risen dramatically in the US for teenage girls and women in their 20s, the rate of such prescriptions for young men “declined abruptly during March 2020 and did not recover.”
The majority of Americans are not engaged at work, 70% of managers have no training to lead a hybrid team and it could be killing employee engagement ( www.cnbc.com )
The end of workplace loyalty: Why work feels so broken right now — and how it can be repaired ( www.businessinsider.com )
In the two years I've been writing about Americans' changing relationship to work, there's one theme that's come up over and over again: loyalty. Whether my stories are about quiet quitting, or job-hopping, or leveraging a job offer from a competitor to force your boss to give you a raise, readers seem to divide into two groups....
A billionaire wrote this letter to Google a year ago. How likely is that Google's layoffs and actions since then are at least partly because of this? ( lemmy.world )
Janeway’s “Tuvix” Decision Divides ‘Star Trek: Voyager’ Cast: “It Kind Of Hurt Her Character” ( trekmovie.com )
A Death at Walmart ( newrepublic.com )
Janikka Perry never made it home from her shift at the bakery of a supercenter in Arkansas. She was one of many Walmart workers who have been pressured to work through illness or pain, sometimes with devastating consequences.
Amazon, DoorDash, Walmart, trapping workers in poverty: UN rights expert ( news.un.org )
A UN poverty expert called on the CEOs of Amazon, DoorDash and Walmart on Tuesday to address allegations that wages at the US-based corporations are trapping workers in poverty, forcing them to rely on US Government benefits to survive.
(Anti Union talk due to new UAW wins/Tesla to unionize) Elon Musk: I disagree with the idea of unions [5:36 | Elon Musk and Andrew Ross Sorkin | CNBC Television] ( www.youtube.com )
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/9075430...
Silicon Valley’s worldview is not just an ideology; it’s a personality disorder. | Crooked Timber ( crookedtimber.org )
I'm not asking to be rich. ( lemmy.world )
It's slightly windy ( yiffit.net )
Kevin McCarthy won't run again for speaker after House ouster ( www.axios.com )
Kevin McCarthy Ousted as House Speaker in Historic Vote ( www.wsj.com )
Unions work. That's why the corporations don't like them. ( lemmy.world )
Flashback - Mark Zuckerberg on billionaires: 'No one deserves to have that much money' ( www.cnn.com )
Biden: Trump is determined 'to destroy American democracy' ( www.msnbc.com )
GOP Reportedly Trying to Find More Palatable Ways to Say They Oppose Reproductive Freedom ( www.rollingstone.com )
Republicans have styled themselves as “pro-life” for decades. They may be ready to build themselves a new glossary...
Opinion | ‘I’m OK, but Things Are Terrible’ ( www.nytimes.com )
If President Biden loses his bid for re-election, a key factor will be the widespread perception that the economy is doing badly on his watch. Poll after poll shows Americans rating economic conditions as very bad and giving Biden very low approval for his economic management....
AOC urges US to apologize for meddling in Latin America: ‘We’re here to reset relationships’ ( www.theguardian.com )
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a prominent member of Congress and leading voice of the American left, has called on the US government to issue an apology to Latin American countries for decades of meddling in their affairs and causing instability in the region....
How did we get here? The dumbing of America, from Reagan to Trump and beyond ( www.salon.com )
Note from the OP: this is an opinion piece, not a news piece....
The lights are flickering in Red America ( onlysky.media )
Red states are suffering brain drain, and not just in Idaho. Doctors are packing up and leaving states like Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia, and more....
Clarence Thomas officially discloses private trips on GOP donor Harlan Crow's plane | CNN Politics ( www.cnn.com )
Justice Clarence Thomas disclosed Thursday that Republican megadonor Harlan Crow paid for private jet trips for Thomas in 2022 to attend a speech in Texas and a vacation at Crow’s luxurious New York estate, as ethics questions continue to rock the Supreme Court....
Even Clarence Thomas’s Law Clerks Can’t Defend His Misconduct ( nymag.com )
After the most recent revelations, Thomas’s defenders have gone conspicuously silent. Organs like National Review and conservative legal apparatchik Ed Whelan, who loudly dismissed evidence of wrongdoing by Thomas, have had nothing to say about Thomas’s many billionaire patrons....
Bernie Sanders urges left to back Biden to stop ‘very dangerous’ Trump ( www.theguardian.com )
Leftwing senator advises ‘unification of progressive people in general’ because threat from Republican ex-president is too great...
What if employers could gauge the ‘moods’ of workers? A dangerous new tech gains ground in India ( scroll.in )
Emotion recognition systems are finding growing use, from monitoring customer responses to ads to scanning for ‘distressed’ women in danger.
Pretending to be daddy ( i.imgur.com )
Ex-FBI official says GOP is telling agents: 'If you investigate our party, you are going to pay the price' ( www.rawstory.com )
Former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi wasn't happy after watching Republicans grill FBI director Christopher Wray in the House Wednesday. While Democrats questioned Wray for ignoring warnings about Jan. 6, Republicans sought answers to a slew of conspiracy theories and culture war grievances that go a...