I listen to the Last Podcast on the Left and I’m learning now about the DuPonts. I’m astounded how it may seem like so little people know of them aside from the listeners. These are actual demons in living people to do the things they do. For example, they’re responsible for Teflon which is produced using C8 chemical. This is a forever chemical.
To give you an idea as to how royally fucked the world has been, Teflon is in numerous things that we use everyday. It is in the non-stick cookware we use. It’s in waterproof fabrics. Food packaging. Just a lot of shit. And we use these things - every. day. This chemical, once it is in you, it’s in you until even through death hence it being a forever chemical and there’s no way you can be rid of it. It can spawn cancerous cells in your body.
And I’m just listening to all of this thinking “Forget half of the shit we’re gearing our anger towards, it’s THESE people we need to draw and quarter!” because of the insurmountable damage and influence they’ve been in so many things that has everyone’s lives in a stranglehold.
Marketing. It rapes all cultures and destroys politics and democracy, as well as spirituality and religions.
It’s probably one of the foundational causes of everything fucked up in the world. Psychological manipulation that bleeds soul and innocents from genuine human beings. It’s what creates the false gods and false idols and takes people off the path the universe meant for them until they are wandering lost.
It makes the elites. It’s what helps feed their greed.
The other enemy is the willingness and stupidity of regular people that blindly buy into this culture of manipulation and passive slave ownership.
I’m my home town as a child we took a field trip to the DuPont wetlands. Wetlands near the DuPont plant.
I hadn’t thought about that field trip until just now.
We made plaster casts of animal footprints and brought them home to our parents.
The thing is we didn’t go out looking for animal footprints. They had rubber molds ready for us to use.
Didn’t think much of it at the time but as an adult I’m sitting here thinking “holy shit DuPont is using children to make it seem like there still plenty of animals near the DuPont plant.
Oligarchism is just 1 face of concentration-of-wealth-archy: monarchism, communist-party-archism are other variants of it.
The REAL enemy is our unconscious-nature, our unconscious ego-addiction-to-ignorance-preventing-accountability-or-responsibility-while-assuming-inherent-authority-and-inherent-validity.
ALL prejudices are rooted in that, not just class-prejudices.
Until human-nature is force-changed, as it is going to be by the end of this century ( The Great Filter ), we’re going to keep enforcing DarkTriad’s rule for OUR supremacy, no matter what kind of “us” it is that we are identifying-as, gender, race, class, age, culture, ANYthing!
Nothing can change that.
It’s simply our world-species equivalent-to-puberty.
EITHER some subset of humankind force-grows-up COMPLETELY, this-century, XOR… whole-species DarwinAward.
Ever seen an addict fighting for their own life against their own unconscious-mind’s addiction-to-obliteration-and-nonresponsibility?
We’re looking at planet-wide equivalent, now.
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Is this a question? Or are you just venting?
Pick your battles and go to town. You can’t fight them all, but you can fight for what you feel is most important.
Its always capitalism. With collective ownership of production and the removal of the profit motive, almost none of these problems would exist. From politicians, to over policing, to marketing, to the poison in our food. It is all in the name of capitalism and forever increasing profit. They built a system that requires infinity in a very finite world. Capitalism will kill every thing on the planet unless it is abolished.
Don’t forget the social media algorithms that poison our societies with polarization and radicalization. There’s only one reason why these exists, to maximize time on site ie. maximize ad revenue. The ad-based economy has truly destroyed the internet.
Yep, just another shard of the profit over people machine
- the money men who finance fascism
- the media men who sell fascism
- the racists who vote fascism
- politicians who take bribes
Yes we need to direct our anger to the wealthy elites that do anything for a profit regardless of what it does to the planet or the people living here. Problem is they own the media that controls the masses, and they’ve got a good chunk of people convinced it’s actually the poor and powerless that are the cause of the worlds problems. They sit like dragons on their piles of gold. We should eat the rich.
We really ought to fix the system that gave them the incentives to/rewarded them for behaving this way. Don’t shoot the messenger.
No, if you have a billion dollars while people starve you’re morally compromised and I have no sympathy for you, just like they have no sympathy for the majority of people on the planet.
Por que no los dos? Might as well prevent it from happening again while your’e at it
It never ends. The injustices pile up faster than they can be addressed. This is a feature, not a flaw of the system, because the system isn’t designed for you and me. It’s designed to make the wealthy comfortable and stable.
The best thing you can do for yourself is to disconnect. Focus on the things in life that propel you forward. Spend time with loved ones. Cultivate a sense of appreciation and gratitude for the things that go right. Exercise and take care of yourself. Don’t let the bastards steal your happiness.
The ruling class
Turn your aggression toward building up alternative systems that allow us to reduce and eventually eliminate our need to rely on capitalist systems dominated by sociopaths. That could be taking part in a mutual aid group, creating a free food fridge in food deserts, or learning how to grow your own produce along with your friends and neighbors.
For more info on exactly how to do that stuff, look here: https://slrpnk.net/post/34794436/21025333
Greetings, I do not seek at all to be rude – let me preface with that.
I think about this quite often, and I particularly bristle at suggestions like “create a free food fridge in a food desert.” I am all for helping people in need, to be sure, but that particular recommendation seems like something that would be ignored, marginalized, or abused/destroyed. The fact is, time is finite, so we gotta think in terms of maximizing usefulness. Trying to fill a bottomless pit does nobody any good. Or, as the expression goes, “give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for his whole life” (or something).
Hi, no offense taken.
but that particular recommendation seems like something that would be ignored, marginalized, or abused/destroyed.
If I may ask, are you basing that on personal experience, or your own research into the effectiveness of community food fridges?
Personally, I don’t see it as terribly different from the work of Food Not Bombs, which provides food to anyone who needs it at a particular location at set schedule.
The usefulness of a community fridge is that it can often be used to prevent food wastage. As an example, if your garden produces too many zucchini for you or your neighbors to eat, the extra can be distributed to the food fridge for anyone who needs them. Local small businesses also often participate, and donate their unsold food to prevent having to throw it away.
The Teach a Man to fish analogy is sometimes not viable in vulnerable communities or impoverished ones. As an example, if someone lives and works in a food desert, they may not have access to a car to get them to a grocery store with more healthy food options, and their job’s low pay may effectively trap them in that area if the places closer to a good grocery store are too expensive to rent. You could potentially teach them how to grow their own food if they have a viable place to grow them, but they may not be able to spare the extra funds to purchase the seeds or the equipment required to start growing effectively. Everyone has different circumstances.
I’d suggest taking a look at this instructional video on how to set up a food fridge by someone who has already done so to see how viable it is in practice, and how much good it can potentially do. You may find that your views on it change when its laid out in such a way.
You make several compelling points.
My cynicism is based on my general view that anonymous strangers are often unhelpful, but to be more accurate, I would have to acknowledge my feedback would vary a lot based on region. For instance, I mostly grew up in TX (nearish I-35). However, I lived in Western Washington for years, and I can easily see a community pantry being appreciated there.
So if I were to revise my comment now, I’d seek to emphasize that some regional populations have been propagandized and are destructive. And like some people don’t mind contributing like that, but I see it like trying to fill a jug with a hole in the bottom.
but I see it like trying to fill a jug with a hole in the bottom.
If viewed from the perspective that the community fridge isn’t solving the issue of the people near it needing it to be continuously resupplied, then yes, it is a ‘bottomless pit’. But at the same time, what it is providing is a somewhat constant relief from the system which created the circumstances for a community fridge to be needed, which means its also a source of endless/ongoing harm reduction.
But, if the community fridge is viewed as one tool in our belt with which to build alternative systems that would eventually allow us to decouple from our current one, then it is not a bottomless pit, and instead is one very needed and useful stepping stone leading to a much more egalitarian and prosperous society that could eliminate food deserts and wage labor entirely. In that way, a community fridge is just one form of prefiguration. Specifically, a community fridge is building out one part of a gift-economy.
If you’d like to see the end result of those efforts visualized in a very realisistic manner, I’d highly suggest The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin, which is a classic sci-fi novel based in an egalitarian gift-economy, and goes quite in-depth on how it functions.
I know The Dispossessed!
I’m generally supportive of the idea of feeding people. I’m further supportive of like people helping people. I think the part that makes me apprehensive is that the system you describe fundamentally operates on assumptions that sidestep the matter of beneficiaries knowing the source of the benefits, which seems very dubious. The idea seems to be quite kind and selfless, but I still think this is a scenario where folks will fail to appreciate the kindness involved because they’re simply unaware of the effort made by numerous folks involved
Oligarchs and tyants. The ruling class in general.
We need a revolution to overthrow the pedofile parasite class.
I turned my attention to the aggression and the aggression went away.
It’s impossible to stay angry at anything for longer than a few seconds unless you keep feeding that anger with the stories you’re telling yourself. You don’t have to keep telling those stories - unless you want to stay angry, of course.
Remember that smart decision you made while angry? Yeah, me neither.
Who let a sensible reply in here? 🤪
Before I got my depression treated, I was angry all the time, and like you said, it was physically and mentally taxing to be angry all the time.
I wish a lot of folks here would take the doomscrolling energy and devote it to some direct action. You will actually help those in need, work out a good chunk of your frustration, and you’ll meet awesome, like-minded people. Best thing I’ve ever done in my life.
Teflon. Goddamned Teflon. Did your podcast mention Dr. Kenneth Berry? (No, not the nutrition quack. The other one.)
Dr. Roy J. Plunkett gets all the credit for the discovery of Teflon and it’s true that his name appears on the patent for the process for creating the actual material. As it was the dry powered precipitate wasn’t terribly useful as a consumer product and mostly only saw use being pressed into solid forms for making highly corrosion resistant gaskets and seals for e.g. nuclear equipment.
Dr. Kenneth Berry’s picture is not hanging in the hallways in DuPont’s offices. His name appears on no plaque. He’s not mentioned in the Wikipedia article about Teflon. When it comes to DuPont’s puff pieces and their official history, you’ll notice that in the gap between the accidental discovery of that weird slippery white powder and its advent as a consumer product there is inevitably some dismissive handwaving and use of the passive voice. Oh, “it was discovered that…” and “DuPont engineers determined that…”
They don’t mention that Dr. Kenneth Berry was the inventor of the solution form of Teflon. He figured out how to dissolve and suspend it in liquid, and by extension how to actually apply it to surfaces in a useful manner. He did not invent the pan, but he was instrumental in figuring out how it could be done. And it was Dr. Berry who ate the first fried egg cooked on a Teflon surface — not Marc Grégoire. It’s quite clear. Dr. Berry’s patent was applied for and granted in 1951. Grégoire’s, 1954.
DuPont doesn’t mention this because Dr. Berry also knew damn well what nasty chemicals DuPont was using to produce Teflon, and to some degree he knew where and how they were dumping them. He documented all of this he could, stored it in a bank deposit box, and wrote it into his will that these documents were to be released to the public when he died in 2008. In retaliation for this, DuPont memory holed him. He is persona non grata there, even in death.
I know this because he told me so. Dr. Berry lived in the town I grew up in. It’s not in whole thanks to him that we know the full story of the deeply evil things DuPont has done, but it is certainly in part. I was knee high to a grasshopper at the time so the significance of this was surely lost on me. I know, however, why my mother was so insistent that we never owned any Teflon pans.
Dr. Kenneth Berry: Lived, invented, developed a conscience, once shot my stuck kite out of a tree with his shotgun, tattled on DuPont, died.
I’ve been trying to make sense of why multiple systems end up like this and how to design better. At an individual and small community level there’s decent good people. But once group size or resource pooling goes beyond a certain size more than human attention span, etc then rough edges are blown up.
It’s like small groups can operate on trust and direct feedback but once you get too big then rules and proxies start to dominate. And after that people optimize for those local rules instead of total system health.
Also in small groups you have individuals you tie to systems, but once too big you drop that association in addition to empathy when interacting with the system.
Maybe we need a more modular society focused on local good.
