- cross-posted to:
- PLT@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- PLT@sh.itjust.works
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I don’t know what’s coming after this; better, worse, another version of the same.
I’m just tired of waiting for the other shoe to drop.
My money is on worse. The billionaire class has the means to take full control if society were to collapse and form it in their interest.
Even if a specific currency became meaningless, they’d still have wealth to transfer to whatever currency isn’t.
Oh and to follow on my last comment, I know there’s going to be widespread bloodshed. I’m not blind to that; neither do I welcome it. I know it because gestures widely at human history.
It’s not about “my” ideology; that’s focusing on the wrong part. The problem is that it’s a ridiculous analysis. Most of the people who say this stuff nominally support a free society of some sort, basically a version socialism, but it’s not personal.
MAGA are not socialists but many of them wanted to see the system crash and burn.
What if I want the death of all humans… /s
I suppose you also want to make your own theme park with blackjack and hookers.
Humans….
Some ideologies want to be the boot pressing down on other’s necks and set the world on fire.
The rest aren’t so bad compared to that.
I like this comment.
As much as I crap on certain leftists, they still have the ideology “I wish people were slightly more kinder” and I would love their ideology to be accepted common sense rather than current one.
I would be just as happier if they were considered the new “centrists.” And current right-wing considered far, far extreme.
would love their ideology to be accepted common sense rather than current one
The crazy thing is that the current economic system we utilize isn’t considered nonsensical.
I guess an economic system that requires infinite growth made a bit more sense during the age of discovery, when people were actively finding new continents to exploit. One would think that now we’ve definitively concluded we inhabit a closed system with a finite amount of natural resources, maybe just maybe we could evolve our economic system to reflect that?
Eh, sorry it became kinda a WoT.
I suggest a tweak to the argument that the economic system requiring infinite growth made sense - I don’t think it was a deliberate choice. What probably happened was that someone noticed they could make money off that growth via stocks and slowly we tied more and more of the economy to the stock market. It used to be that fortunes could be lost in stock trading, think the 1920s in the US or even the Dutch Tulip Mania in the 1600s. It was for rich people or people taking a risk. Quarterly reports weren’t a thing. It wasn’t a place for the common person at all. The investment done earlier was wildly different than today.
Now, a huge amount of wealth and financial security of the masses are tied to stocks. Retirement plans in particular. It became profitable to offload defined benefit programs in favor of 401ks. It became profitable to open up brokerages for everyman. CEO’s job security is often tied to quarterly earnings. Personal fortunes are made in stocks with the only prerequisite being lucky enough to have money/given stock options to invest and making the right choice (which is why nobody earns enough salary/works hard enough to be a billionaire or hundred-milllionaire, it’s all stock). The line must continue upwards. Almost nobody makes money by opening new markets or making new discoveries anymore, it’s not 1950. Tesla would be a rare example of a new market. But nowadays company advancement is too incremental to be profitable for most. So they make the line go up by enshittification and buying up the competition.
With so much riding on stocks they’ve become too big to fail. We’ve gone past stock purchases being used to prop up a company’s ability to advance as a gamble on the part of the investor and now we demand infinite growth to prop up a huge chunk of the economy.
I don’t even think capitalism requires infinite growth. It’s just how we built it. Not even since the beginning. That is, you could buy stock in a company to help them grow. Then they make a profit, and give you a share of that profit. Everyone is happy. You could sell that to someone else, and maybe they pay more than you’d get in a year, but they’ll make more in a long run as long as the company stays alive and can keep distributing profits. Everyone is happy.
It’s this idea that the money you make from investment should grow exponentially. This demand from professional stock traders that they be able to sell for obscene profits. The company must grow, and those profits must grow, or the shareholders will all sell in a panic and abandon them, and even a profitable company may go under.
Like why can’t the company just make some profit and distribute that profit among shareholders and employees and everyone be happy? It doesn’t HAVE to be more profit next year than last year, we just made it that way over time.
don’t even think capitalism requires infinite growth. It’s just how we built it. Not even since the beginning.
Eh… It’s kinda baked into a system of competition modified via supply and demand. If there’s not enough demand to initiate the growth of supply then you enter into a recession. Competition forces companies to invest in their avenues of growth so they don’t get cornered out of their market, which means they have to invest more into the company than other companies year over year.
In the beginning stages of capitalism competition is great for building markets, but towards the latter stages of capitalism, especially in fields with high fungibility, competition becomes destructive. Once this destructive competition becomes the norm the only escape for companies to remain profitable and continue growing is to monopolize, conglimorize, or ironically become heavily regulated.
It’s this idea that the money you make from investment should grow exponentially. This demand from professional stock traders that they be able to sell for obscene profits. The company must grow, and those profits must grow, or the shareholders will all sell in a panic and abandon them, and even a profitable company may go under.
It’s not really an option for companies to stagnate, not only because they legally have to make as much profit as possible for shareholders, but because the nature of competition in the market will eventually force them to go under, or more likely be bought up by the competition.
It doesn’t HAVE to be more profit next year than last year, we just made it that way over time.
It’s kinda always been that way, at least since the emergence of business done on a national scale. A lot of the reason Federalism became popularized was because businesses required unified regulation across state lines. Just look at the economic history of railroads and oil tycoons and you’ll see the same scenarios were undergoing today on a smaller scale.
I can’t tell if you crap on leftists who are too far left, or what I seem to be interpreting this as where you’re crapping on american leftists that are actually not very left at all lol
both are valid. and proper left is somewhere between them imo lol
Many of those people will not have developed political reasoning, and will consider themselves “apolitical” due to having never investigated their own political viewpoints…
Or worse, they’ll consider themselves “objective” when it comes to politics, claiming they just know when something is true, or good for people.
Meaning stand up for your belief, and to the victor, the spoils. It’s ironic. 🤷♂️
If post-apocalyptic media has taught us anything, it’s that the same systems will rise again, only now they are even more warped and fucked up than they were before the apocalypse.
They all have the same ideology, forged and molded by the algorithm of social media.
The deaths are already happening under the current ideology and are endless until stopped.
Oh cool, that’s totally a real and valid reason to embrace murdering as many people as possible.
Who’s planning on murdering as many people as possible? Seems like someone writing a fantasy villain and not at all related to reality.
Thank you for confirming you have no fucking idea what happens when a society collapses.
People start murdering as many people as possible??? Is that what happens?
It’s the most high-casualty course of events possible under most circumstances, yes. Sorry that the ample evidence of the past 200 fucking years hasn’t made that clear enough for you?
Is that true though? I mean I just did a mental review of collapses that came to mind and not even the USSR resulted in mass deaths? I mean the mass deaths were for causes the led to the collapse of the USSR but the actual collapse was not what caused the deaths.
Unless you mean that the new order that takes the place of the one before is the one that causes mass casualties because that does seem to be the usual case. No one actually falls in line with the ideology that wants to dominate, which I guess is your greater point.
Is that true though?
Somalia, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan (thrice), Sudan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, South Sudan, Yemen…
Yes. It’s very true.
To be fair the USSR started with mass death and slaughter. Then continued in with it for some time. Strictly speaking the government never collapsed. Oh sure they loosened their grip on former forcefully conquered vassal States. But the bourgeoisie of the party didn’t go anywhere. They simply gave up the pretense of sharing the means of production. And transition to outright owning them as proper bourgeoisie.
We shouldn’t fool ourselves though. Russia is actually still slowly collapsing as are many governments. Hundreds of thousands of Russia’s sons have been conscripted to fight for a fascist in their very own Vietnam. With a heavy death toll and no end in sight. As day by day the requirements for qualification to be conscripted are broadened. Putin literally just burning away a large chunk of their society. It’s happening, just quietly now that there 4th estate in the US and globally has been captured and stripped bare at the altar of capitalism. Doesn’t matter if it’s east or west. Journalist are regularly fired, disappeared, or just slaughtered for doing their jobs
Trump defunding USAID will kill 14 million people. I call that murder.
What are you even arguing about.
“Present situation bad” is not a fucking reason to advocate for the collapse of society, which literal millions of people will die in the course of.
I didn’t realize that I had to fucking trace out that the collapse of society is bad, but I guess the OP was just too subtle.
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OP just fyi but i think that somehow reducing the human population by 99.99%, leaving around a million or so, would not be the worst thing ever for hardcore environmentalism.
So however way society collapsed or for whatever reason, the ensueing starvation of billions due to collapsing fertilizer and fuel supply chains, is the fantasy.
spoiler
/s
spoiler
kinda
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My ideology is leaving each other the hell alone.
What if the ‘other’ is building a nuke? What if they refuse to vaccinate and are a notch away from creating a new superbug that will likely kill you? What if they’re pumping pollution into the air and water and maximizing climate change? What if they’re raping and violently torturing children?
What if you need them to maintain your food supply, electricity, medical care, etc? What if you need the local ‘other’ to back you up if another more distant ‘other’ decides it going to kill you and take your land?
I say this as a heavily individualist minded person myself: You can’t operate a worthwhile society as a collection of islands. You need cooperation.
It would be better to eradicate spacetime itself with a vacuum decay event than to allow a completely brutal “every man for themselves” world to continue existing. Pointless suffering.
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They are all using public transport. Already a win.
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Presumably they all have different ideologies
