Historically speaking the elites weren’t that fucked up. In the Middle Ages and the Ancient era in many places the nobility were seen as also being stewards of the underlings and HAD to make sure they didn’t completely fall into shit.
Even the original robber barons funded medical research, and built theaters and libraries and other cultural stuff for the society they lived in. Going farther back, a lot of the beautiful artwork we see made in the Renaissance period was commissioned entirely by some of the most ruthless, murderous bastards in human history.
What we are seeing now is not the greediest of bastards, but simply the most unlettered, the most uncultured, and the most barbaric of them. They live and work and think exactly like gang leaders and brigands who reached a point where they can destroy the restrains against them. They would be content to live in vulgar shit and not enjoy life despite their unimaginable wealth, as long as the rest of the world around them burns. I don’t think even Hitler held the land and the earth and humanity in general with that level of contempt.
In the Middle Ages and the Ancient era in many places the nobility were seen as also being stewards of the underlings and HAD to make sure they didn’t completely fall into shit.
This strikes me as a touch revanchist.
Middle Ages / Ancient Era nobility operated on a patronage system for their courtiers and military officers, sure. But they obtained the surplus to satisfy the duties of the patrician class by looting and pillaging neighboring city-states or by taxing the working people inside their domain.
Even the original robber barons funded medical research, and built theaters and libraries and other cultural stuff for the society they lived in.
They bought bread and built circuses for the artisan class that they sought to cultivate in their immediate vicinity. But their largesse was very geographically limited. The farther from the center of power you got, the more you suffered and the less you benefited.
Communities on the periphery were as heavily exploited then as they are now. Only the limits of technology kept that frontier relatively close by, with innovations like Roman roadways and early Medieval shipbuilding technologies pushing those frontiers outward.
The Vikings were not funding medical research in Angland. The Romans were not building libraries in the Black Forests along the Danube. The Columbian Era Spanish were not bringing Renaissance art and culture to the Aztecs and Incas or sending over architects to build beautiful stained glass churches in what would be Texas and Florida.
I don’t think even Hitler held the land and the earth and humanity in general with that level of contempt.
The Scorched Earth tactics of the World Wars were pioneered a century earlier. General Custard and King Leopold II absolutely employed wholesale destruction of the agricultural basis of local communities as a means of enslaving or exterminating native people.
The English and Portuguese would employ opium addiction as a means of expanding their empire along the Pacific Rim. The French would make an industry of trapping and killing wild game that wiped whole species out of the New World. Their commercial farming practices in Africa and Southeast Asia would obliterate local biomes for private profit.
This is just more of the same short-term profit oriented expansionism. The machines are bigger and the damage more expansive, but the intent and the incentives are all the same.
I stand corrected on a lot of stuff. But I was referring to the imperial core of those people’s rule. Like without the United States most billionaires would not exist, but they are doing less nothing. They are stripping everything for parts. That is what stands different. The British build Britain up (even if it was socialist leaning policies that elevated most poor out of poverty) at the expense of everyone else, they didn’t simply have niche enclaves where they had everything but left the rest of the country/cities into as much shit as is happening now.
Like without the United States most billionaires would not exist
I mean… maybe? The US is ground zero for this aggressive wealth aggregation. But Russia and Germany and India and the Kingdom of Saud and Qatar and even the Evil CCP have a fair share of billionaires. It certainly isn’t impossible to do wealth aggregation outside the US. Hong Kong alone has 67 of them.
The British build Britain up
I gotta say, I disagree. Balkinize Britain. It had 500 years to fuck around. Maybe time to do a bit of Finding Out. Liberate Ireland. Independence for Scotland and Wales. Let London become one of those dystopian Charter Cities, like what they did in Singapore and Hong Kong and Panama and what they’re planning for Gaza, and allow the rest of England to wither on the vine.
Then British refugees can flee to Spain and France, where they can reintegrate with the mainland and rejoin modern Europe when they’re ready.
looting and pillaging neighboring city-states or by taxing the working people inside their domain.
It’s worse today
They bought bread and built circuses for the artisan class that they sought to cultivate in their immediate vicinity. But their largesse was very geographically limited. The farther from the center of power you got, the more you suffered and the less you benefited.
Same today
Only the limits of technology kept that frontier relatively close
Correct, that’s what made it better
The Scorched Earth tactics of the World Wars were pioneered a century earlier. General Custard and King Leopold II absolutely employed wholesale destruction of the agricultural basis of local communities as a means of enslaving or exterminating native people.
More than a century, it’s called scorched earth because you would literally light a fire. And in the same vein is salt the Earth
The English and Portuguese would employ opium addiction as a means of expanding their empire along the Pacific Rim. The French would make an industry of trapping and killing wild game that wiped whole species out of the New World. Their commercial farming practices in Africa and Southeast Asia would obliterate local biomes for private profit.
Same thing goes on today
This is just more of the same short-term profit oriented expansionism. The machines are bigger and the damage more expansive, but the intent and the incentives are all the same.
Yes the lack of technology made it better, though you’re covering a wide time period
The biggest difference is the wealthy realized religion isn’t real (not that it ever mattered: see Catholic ban on ranged weaponry) and no one is going to remember you so bloodline/country doesn’t matter
The biggest difference is the wealthy realized religion isn’t real
The proletariat realized religion isn’t real. Or, at least, the religious demagogues realized there’s no longer a point to evangelizing to the impoverished. Bourgeois still cling to it, though. The ranks of Opus Dei and the Mormon Church are thick with mega-millionaires. Religious indoctrination is one of the ways you get “in” with the upper echelons of the western oligarchy, whether its through Focus on the Family or some Silicon Valley AI cult.
Based on answers in the 2021 census, 53.3% of the Canadian population identify as Christians. That means over 19.3 million Canadians reported belonging to a Christian religion. However, the proportion of Christians is falling rapidly in Canada. In 2011, 67.3% of Canadians identified as Christians, while in 2001, the percentage of Christians was 77.1% of the population.
…
The number of Canadians who say they have no religious affiliation has more than doubled since 2001 when 16.5% of the population had no religious affiliation. By 2011, the percentage had risen to 23.9% and in 2021, 34.6% of Canadians had no religious affiliation. 34.6% is approximately 12.6 million Canadians.
Perhaps the existing Christian base is getting louder, but the raw number of Christians is falling. Meanwhile, no affiliation seems to be filling in the gap. Canada isn’t filling up with Muslims or Satanists or whatever the current ForwardsFromGrandma email chain might suggest.
Based on answers in the 2021 census, 53.3% of the Canadian population identify as Christians. That means over 19.3 million Canadians reported belonging to a Christian religion. However, the proportion of Christians is falling rapidly in Canada. In 2011, 67.3% of Canadians identified as Christians, while in 2001, the percentage of Christians was 77.1% of the population.
Crazy we had 2-3 maybe 3 people out of 200 in my grade that were publicly religious (as in not publicly atheist) everyone I’ve talked to in uni and beyond say the same thing
My grandparents moved here (on both sides) to get away from religion
It wasn’t until adulthood that churches started being built and it taking off
But I did grow up in a very conservative farming town. The 3 things you couldn’t be were black, gay, and religious
Perhaps the existing Christian base is getting louder, but the raw number of Christians is falling. Meanwhile, no affiliation seems to be filling in the gap. Canada isn’t filling up with Muslims or Satanists or whatever the current ForwardsFromGrandma email chain might suggest.
I am aware. When the Nazis were defeated Hitler basically said ‘I was wrong, the Germans are not the master race and they all deserve to be exterminated’.
This is why I don’t understand the love that they have for Hitler. Hitler’s alleged ‘love’ for Germans and his people was extremely conditional. Also he believed in ‘quality’ of genetics over ‘quantity’ and while there is no end to the amount of white supremacists who whine about birth rates, Hitler believed that if his policies resulted in a population decline that would be better because the ‘quality’ would be superior to more dumbasses.
And also when Hitler lost the war, yes, he did have the Nero Decree. I don’t understand why they think someone who was totally fine with the complete destruction of the German ‘aryan’ race is a good role model. If Hitler came back to life (and as he was physically in 1925) he would hold pretty much all neo-Nazis in absolute contempt and wonder why the fuck the Germans are still alive.
What we are seeing now is the rich are Noah’s Arking us to climate change they have known was going to happen since the 70s, and have been preparing for it this whole time. Which is why we haven’t made any real progress with climate change in the first place and has been the Republican goal this whole time - they will just kill most of the people on earth to reduce carbon emissions and then continue as they have been with a smaller pool of people but bigger pool of money.
Is this extremely stupid, cruel, and shortsighted and ignores how people work together in societies to make and build stuff?
Yes.
But look at the Titanic submarine. The rich literally believe they can bend science to their will. They literally think they can force the world to their delusions. And they will bet their lives and their kids’ lives on that.
There’s a reason Trump is building death camps and selling people to other countries. There’s a reason Assad was saved and sent to Russia, as one of the most sophisticated death camp operators in modern times.
And what is fucked is that this also consistent with the actions of many elites. When the going got tough for a lot of major leaders of formerly rich and powerful nations, their course of action was to pack up their valuables and flee.
In Ancient Rome when the empire was declining, many Roman nobility just took their valuables and their slaves/servants away from the cities and started their own self-sufficient villas where they still tried to draw a salary from the empire while not giving a damn to pay taxes back. This is how the feudal system and serfdom as we know it started in some places. During the Fourth Crusade when the crusaders sacked Constantinople the emperor at the time expected his subjects to fight… but fled with his treasury behind him.
Even today with the withdrawal of the US from Afghanistan, the US-backed puppet they put in power spoke about never surrendering, but then fled to the UAE with 150 million dollars with him.
They’re all like this shit. I wonder if even trying to win is even feasible at times.
Edit: The titanic submarine is the perfect example of that. These people weren’t just violating the laws of physics, but they also were talking about submarine travel as if they invented it, when it has been around since the 19th century. Their arrogance is unbelievable.
The difference is that, before, decisions were made by individuals, and generally no matter how greedy, most people have at least a sense of compassion for other humans. Nowadays decisions aren’t made by people, there’s algorithms pushing for the infinite increase of stock value, and whoever doesn’t do that is eaten alive. That’s the problem: in capitalism, companies need to be vile and have absolutely no sense of morality, or they will be outcompeted.
Historically speaking the elites weren’t that fucked up. In the Middle Ages and the Ancient era in many places the nobility were seen as also being stewards of the underlings and HAD to make sure they didn’t completely fall into shit.
Even the original robber barons funded medical research, and built theaters and libraries and other cultural stuff for the society they lived in. Going farther back, a lot of the beautiful artwork we see made in the Renaissance period was commissioned entirely by some of the most ruthless, murderous bastards in human history.
What we are seeing now is not the greediest of bastards, but simply the most unlettered, the most uncultured, and the most barbaric of them. They live and work and think exactly like gang leaders and brigands who reached a point where they can destroy the restrains against them. They would be content to live in vulgar shit and not enjoy life despite their unimaginable wealth, as long as the rest of the world around them burns. I don’t think even Hitler held the land and the earth and humanity in general with that level of contempt.
This strikes me as a touch revanchist.
Middle Ages / Ancient Era nobility operated on a patronage system for their courtiers and military officers, sure. But they obtained the surplus to satisfy the duties of the patrician class by looting and pillaging neighboring city-states or by taxing the working people inside their domain.
They bought bread and built circuses for the artisan class that they sought to cultivate in their immediate vicinity. But their largesse was very geographically limited. The farther from the center of power you got, the more you suffered and the less you benefited.
Communities on the periphery were as heavily exploited then as they are now. Only the limits of technology kept that frontier relatively close by, with innovations like Roman roadways and early Medieval shipbuilding technologies pushing those frontiers outward.
The Vikings were not funding medical research in Angland. The Romans were not building libraries in the Black Forests along the Danube. The Columbian Era Spanish were not bringing Renaissance art and culture to the Aztecs and Incas or sending over architects to build beautiful stained glass churches in what would be Texas and Florida.
The Scorched Earth tactics of the World Wars were pioneered a century earlier. General Custard and King Leopold II absolutely employed wholesale destruction of the agricultural basis of local communities as a means of enslaving or exterminating native people.
The English and Portuguese would employ opium addiction as a means of expanding their empire along the Pacific Rim. The French would make an industry of trapping and killing wild game that wiped whole species out of the New World. Their commercial farming practices in Africa and Southeast Asia would obliterate local biomes for private profit.
This is just more of the same short-term profit oriented expansionism. The machines are bigger and the damage more expansive, but the intent and the incentives are all the same.
I stand corrected on a lot of stuff. But I was referring to the imperial core of those people’s rule. Like without the United States most billionaires would not exist, but they are doing less nothing. They are stripping everything for parts. That is what stands different. The British build Britain up (even if it was socialist leaning policies that elevated most poor out of poverty) at the expense of everyone else, they didn’t simply have niche enclaves where they had everything but left the rest of the country/cities into as much shit as is happening now.
I mean… maybe? The US is ground zero for this aggressive wealth aggregation. But Russia and Germany and India and the Kingdom of Saud and Qatar and even the Evil CCP have a fair share of billionaires. It certainly isn’t impossible to do wealth aggregation outside the US. Hong Kong alone has 67 of them.
I gotta say, I disagree. Balkinize Britain. It had 500 years to fuck around. Maybe time to do a bit of Finding Out. Liberate Ireland. Independence for Scotland and Wales. Let London become one of those dystopian Charter Cities, like what they did in Singapore and Hong Kong and Panama and what they’re planning for Gaza, and allow the rest of England to wither on the vine.
Then British refugees can flee to Spain and France, where they can reintegrate with the mainland and rejoin modern Europe when they’re ready.
It’s worse today
Same today
Correct, that’s what made it better
More than a century, it’s called scorched earth because you would literally light a fire. And in the same vein is salt the Earth
Brief reference
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salting_the_earth
Same thing goes on today
Yes the lack of technology made it better, though you’re covering a wide time period
The biggest difference is the wealthy realized religion isn’t real (not that it ever mattered: see Catholic ban on ranged weaponry) and no one is going to remember you so bloodline/country doesn’t matter
The proletariat realized religion isn’t real. Or, at least, the religious demagogues realized there’s no longer a point to evangelizing to the impoverished. Bourgeois still cling to it, though. The ranks of Opus Dei and the Mormon Church are thick with mega-millionaires. Religious indoctrination is one of the ways you get “in” with the upper echelons of the western oligarchy, whether its through Focus on the Family or some Silicon Valley AI cult.
Idk, Canada is a lot more religious now than in the 20th century
It’s takes a second to differentiate someone telling you they have a religion and they aren’t saying they’re gay
It’s prejudice and I try not to hold it against them but a life of being raised prejudice makes me think for a moment
https://madeinca.ca/religion-statistics-canada/
…
Perhaps the existing Christian base is getting louder, but the raw number of Christians is falling. Meanwhile, no affiliation seems to be filling in the gap. Canada isn’t filling up with Muslims or Satanists or whatever the current ForwardsFromGrandma email chain might suggest.
Crazy we had 2-3 maybe 3 people out of 200 in my grade that were publicly religious (as in not publicly atheist) everyone I’ve talked to in uni and beyond say the same thing
My grandparents moved here (on both sides) to get away from religion
It wasn’t until adulthood that churches started being built and it taking off
But I did grow up in a very conservative farming town. The 3 things you couldn’t be were black, gay, and religious
It’s Christians in my experience
while there’s good points, the last sentence is out of place.
That guy was contempt manifest. In the end he ordered the destruction of the oh so beloved country
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero_Decree
I am aware. When the Nazis were defeated Hitler basically said ‘I was wrong, the Germans are not the master race and they all deserve to be exterminated’.
This is why I don’t understand the love that they have for Hitler. Hitler’s alleged ‘love’ for Germans and his people was extremely conditional. Also he believed in ‘quality’ of genetics over ‘quantity’ and while there is no end to the amount of white supremacists who whine about birth rates, Hitler believed that if his policies resulted in a population decline that would be better because the ‘quality’ would be superior to more dumbasses.
And also when Hitler lost the war, yes, he did have the Nero Decree. I don’t understand why they think someone who was totally fine with the complete destruction of the German ‘aryan’ race is a good role model. If Hitler came back to life (and as he was physically in 1925) he would hold pretty much all neo-Nazis in absolute contempt and wonder why the fuck the Germans are still alive.
At least some of those old murderous bastards patronized the arts and the sciences.
Current murderous bastards actively seek to destroy them and ‘at most’ they will share or create memes.
Worst elites ever.
What we are seeing now is the rich are Noah’s Arking us to climate change they have known was going to happen since the 70s, and have been preparing for it this whole time. Which is why we haven’t made any real progress with climate change in the first place and has been the Republican goal this whole time - they will just kill most of the people on earth to reduce carbon emissions and then continue as they have been with a smaller pool of people but bigger pool of money.
Is this extremely stupid, cruel, and shortsighted and ignores how people work together in societies to make and build stuff?
Yes.
But look at the Titanic submarine. The rich literally believe they can bend science to their will. They literally think they can force the world to their delusions. And they will bet their lives and their kids’ lives on that.
There’s a reason Trump is building death camps and selling people to other countries. There’s a reason Assad was saved and sent to Russia, as one of the most sophisticated death camp operators in modern times.
https://www.nbcnews.com/investigations/incoming-trump-administration-plans-deport-migrants-countries-rcna182896
www.nbcnews.com/news/rcna189522
https://www.semafor.com/article/02/06/2025/trump-administration-container-company-to-provide-temporary-migrant-housing
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/restoring-the-death-penalty-and-protecting-public-safety/
And what is fucked is that this also consistent with the actions of many elites. When the going got tough for a lot of major leaders of formerly rich and powerful nations, their course of action was to pack up their valuables and flee.
In Ancient Rome when the empire was declining, many Roman nobility just took their valuables and their slaves/servants away from the cities and started their own self-sufficient villas where they still tried to draw a salary from the empire while not giving a damn to pay taxes back. This is how the feudal system and serfdom as we know it started in some places. During the Fourth Crusade when the crusaders sacked Constantinople the emperor at the time expected his subjects to fight… but fled with his treasury behind him.
Even today with the withdrawal of the US from Afghanistan, the US-backed puppet they put in power spoke about never surrendering, but then fled to the UAE with 150 million dollars with him.
They’re all like this shit. I wonder if even trying to win is even feasible at times.
Edit: The titanic submarine is the perfect example of that. These people weren’t just violating the laws of physics, but they also were talking about submarine travel as if they invented it, when it has been around since the 19th century. Their arrogance is unbelievable.
The difference is that, before, decisions were made by individuals, and generally no matter how greedy, most people have at least a sense of compassion for other humans. Nowadays decisions aren’t made by people, there’s algorithms pushing for the infinite increase of stock value, and whoever doesn’t do that is eaten alive. That’s the problem: in capitalism, companies need to be vile and have absolutely no sense of morality, or they will be outcompeted.