JFC
The difference is that they figured out the solution to the problem this time. Just ahve your own media ecosystem that spins a parallel reality that the racist rubes will eat up.
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Right. Thatâs why I donât think the wealthy are making any mistakes at all.
If someone can tell me how we get to this point Iâd love to hear it:
This has to be fake right?
They had all of that in the 20âs. Also they donât have anything remotely like total control of anything but cable news and legacy media. The younger generations arenât paying much attention to any of it. A lot of us have already made up our minds about capitalism and the GOP, and that even includes me⌠a white straight married man in my late 30âs who more than meets the GOPâs standard for a âsmall business personâ and earns a living that puts him in the top 1% for my age group⌠and Iâm very much NOT a Republican or even a capitalist even if I am good at capitalism the game.
Honestly the weirdest thing is that of the people my own age I know who are genuinely great at making money, and I know a few, most of us seem to be pretty disgusted by the system weâre dealing with. Itâs kind of like how I donât really believe in successful members of the clergy who are also true believers. I think itâs incredibility difficult to keep faith when your business is selling it to other people. I grew up around it and the calculations that are going on in the background just arenât conducive to still believing in god.
At this point to understand the system well enough to make it pay you using only your wits is to understand how fundamentally broken it is and how much harm it is causing. Iâve seen people manage to delude themselves out of the resulting depression but I just donât have the tolerance for the level of cognitive dissonance that requires. Itâs easier to just feel the moral sting IMO.
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My former rep doing it right: Statement of Congressman Jamie Raskin on the Current Crisis of GOP Chaos and Dysfunction | Press Releases | Congressman Jamie Raskin
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I think for a lot of stocks thatâs going to happen anyway. I mean, at some point when you have no middle class, there are a lot of companies that can no longer make much money. And if the lower class is getting squeezed just as hard, if not harder (spoiler alert!), the margins arenât going up for the discount retailers and consumer staples sectors.
Obviously there are some winners, too, but Iâm not sure there are enough for the broader markets to not take a hit on earnings. That said, income inequality helps keep stock prices inflated because youâve got to put the money somewhere.
That works⌠until it doesnât. At some point if the real reality is too grim, the bullshit isnât strong enough.
I mean, they think thereâs a conspiracy by liberal elites to yada yada yada⌠Theyâre not that far off. Replace Bill Gates and the Clintons with like alllll the wealthy elites and change drink childrenâs blood to hoard all the money and fuck over the working man, and youâre pretty much there.
Or, listen to that Rich Men North of Richmond song, and notice that the first verse or so is like spot on.
The current system of any random asshole being able to âpublishâ something to social media and have it get picked up by millions has never existed before in all of human history. We have no idea if hte currenty dystopian path is escapable.
I would say the printing press was comparable. Only took 2-300 years for society to adapt to it kinda. The arrival of hard liquor was pretty world changing too.
Uh, wat?
God sheâs the fucking best.
https://x.com/aoc/status/1709612216440217708?s=46&t=XGja5BtSraUljl_WWUrIUg
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Right and they (the ones with money to run campaigns or ownership of the main social media platforms) can A B test those messages to find the most resonating and inflammatory then selectively amplify those messages to the right people. Like cable news and talk radio is also effective but that was 1990s and early 00âs era. What can be done in our current times is much more difficult to overcome.
When distilled spirits like whiskey arrived on the scene they basically destroyed society for a century⌠which is funny when you think about all the negative stereotypes around first nations people and drinking. When Europeans first got whiskey they absolutely couldnât handle it for over a hundred years and they werenât actively being having genocide done to them when it was introduced to them.
Agree with this, but donât see how these people pivot to anything palatable. Voting for a Democrat is a mortal sin to most of these people, plus like 80+% of national profile Democrats are wealthy elites so that wonât solve their problems anyway.
Humans are just super susceptible to falling for cults and cult like figures. Think about what a large percentage of humans organized religion has a hold over, while being objectively bullshit. But they use the same techniques as cults to gain and control their followers.
Obama won because he was a cult like figure, Trump won because he mastered how to speak to the cult. The reality is that progress is only made when you get the occasional mix of the right cultural meta combined with the right cult like figure coming to power in that moment to make something happen. Itâs often extremely flawed people not doing it for the right reasons, but just happen to be in the right place at the right moment.
Similarly, the most degenerative things in our society tend to be carried out by these figures coming to power in the wrong cultural moments.
How much money do you think it cost to print something on the printing press? How much does it cost to put something on the internet? I donât think they are comparable. The people who used the printing press to publish stuff were at least accomplished enough in society to afford to use the press. Any idiot with 10 bucks and an internet cafe can put shit on the internet.
People have been drinking alcohol since before the dawn of agriculture, and distilled spirits have been around since the Middle Ages. So I really have no clue what youâre talking about.
So the important thing to take into account here isnât the cost per unit but the change in cost per unit. Prior to the printing press books had to be hand copied and were very expensive, and thus could only be found in the libraries of the wealthy which bought them often as status symbols or the monasteries that were the major producers of books.
So the cost change for a printed page was functionally infinite because even though paper, ink, and a printing press werenât free they were so much cheaper they functionally rendered books free (or in this case widely accessible to anyone who could read).
And the social changes were extreme because drum roll⌠people printed lies. Lots of them. And up to this point anything written had been expensive and if you were going to slander someone in writing it would be in a letter which very few people could even read. People tended to think of stuff written on paper as almost true by definition which made printing handbills coated in lies a very effective strategy.
Thereâs a strong argument to be made that the arrival of the printing press triggered religious conflicts in Europe that killed millions of people at a time when the population of Europe wasnât actually all that high.
An equivalent event would be a civil war with 10M+ casualties in the US because of the internet. Which might still happen I guess weâll see weâre extremely early still.
Yes Iâm talking about the 12th-13th centuries. It took a while to get up to full production and really took off with whiskey, rum, and colonialism. The upper class had access to spirits first and then it progressed as they got cheaper. By the 1500âs the poors were getting very fucked up most of the time and they had begun villainizing it.
One of the problems with it was that they already had a drinking culture and that drinking culture was beverages that were massively lower proof than hard liquor⌠and people didnât adjust the serving sizes.
They were still drinking an astounding amount of hard liquor as recently as the 17-1800s. It took hundreds of years for society to adapt.
There was more to it than just the social/health damage of rampant alcoholism too. The Rum/Whiskey trades heavily factored into making colonialism/slavery pencil out in the western hemisphere. Every atrocity committed by the French in Haiti was done to produce rum to sell in Europe.