This comic is seared into my brain. Fuck capitalism.
The the level of condoned, unapologetic, unembarrassed insatiable greed my species demonstrates and celebrates makes me root for the success of our many self-inflicted crises.
People used to acknowledge the plague that the deeply broken greed class were to society. We then decided embrace the darkest demons in our nature rather than conquer them.
I can’t root for the home species if this is who we are, sorry. The humans with the fewest to no scruples profiting off the death of children who already had nothing, to the cheers of private shareholders and sycophant peasants everywhere. We know better. We claim to be better in empty rhetoric. In actions though, our species is made up of proud monsters, their enablers/worshippers, and their victims.
If we were a society that cared for one another fighting climate change and the like, it would be different, but when they arent building luxury climate bunkers to escape as they continue fucking the planet for private profit, any action those in power take to stave off problems like climate change are just in service to prolonging/not disrupting this cycle of cruelty/dominion/exploitation.
We know better. We claim to be better in empty rhetoric. In actions though, our species is made up of proud monsters, their enablers/worshippers, and their victims.
I’ve been saying this for years. The “civilized” world acts like we’re better because we’re not cutting people’s heads off for perceived crimes, but we’ve clearly just exchanged that for the far more sophisticated (and far more fucked up) mental and emotional torture.
Just look at how the US treats prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. We have never been “better,” it’s a fucking lie we tell ourselves to justify it all. The US especially is great at twisting language to justify it. It’s not “torture” it’s “enhanced interrogation.”
Everyone wants to be the hero of the story, fighting a righteous battle against the evil monstrous Enemy^tm.
The truth is no one is 100% a hero, and no one is 100% the villain. We all act within the confines of our humanity. For some this is monstrous acts, for others its righteous ones. But no one is exclusively one or the other, we all spend most of our time somewhere in between.
Counterpoint: Fred Rogers
Definitely tending towards righteousness, but I would still say the majority of his life was spent being a regular human.
Which, I think, was the point of his show. He was just a normal man who could treat others with compassion. Putting him on a pedestal and treating him like a saint means that its nigh impossible to live up to him. And I think he would find that a terrible message to send.
We are all human. How we choose to show that humanity defines us, not the humanity itself.
When we’re hero worshiping, that’s also a projection of our shadows.
Friendly reminder that Ron DeSantis worked at Gitmo.
I think it’s worth noting… It’s not just the 1%. Every time we buy something without asking important questions about “who’s behind this and what did they do to make it happen” we contribute to the monster. We made this possible by showing billion dollar corporations they can rape the world and we’ll still buy their product because it’s $3 cheaper than the company doing it the right way and showing companies that want to do it the right way, they better fall in line or get run out of business in the name of efficiency.
I’m not saying every purchase needs to be done with caution, but I do think we need to abandon the “I got this for 3 dollars cheaper!!! Hahahaha” bargain bin shopping culture. The “I buy the best value” culture that doesn’t ask about the workers involved shares no small portion of the blame. If you have the chance to think about these things, do it. (If you have the means) show the shareholders that your integrity can’t be bought for 62 cents off.
Cheap ultimately isn’t cheap. The working class and the professional class failed to heed that warning and it’s nearly destroyed the middle class as a whole.
“Ah our ‘human death and suffering’ portfolio is really booming this year”
“…United States is never going to interpret the law…
…what can you even say.
Of course. This isn’t news. This is gradually opening the public’s eyes to what capitalism runs on and what it turns people into.
What’s changed that would open the public’s eyes now? This has been going on for millennia.
Like so many heinous realities that happened and continue to happen through human history, what has changed is mass literacy, instant access to up to the minute information, and ubiquitous audio/video recording by the citizenry.
At most, most people interested in current events at all used to get 1 highly manicured source of data from one highly biased source a day, a newspaper.
Now most people struggle to escape constant deluges of information. This is how the masses came for mass rape culture in business, this is why its understandable in public to condemn the nation’s police forces, etc. The nature of the information age opened and continues to open the larger population to realities they only had glimmers of before, and even when things were understood to be a certain way, people didn’t go above and beyond to verify inconvenient/troubling suspicions.
Now, anything of the slightest interest is shown to you 17 times a day. Inconvenient truths are thankfully belabored until there is either a response (ie MeToo) or a sad mass realization of an ongoing injustice/travesty we’re powerless to change (ie guns/for profit prisons/for profit war).
Tldr Humans have been and never stopped being bastards towards one another through all recorded history, this is just tbe first age where everyone is literally confronted with the direct evidence of that truth 24/7.
That ignores the echo chamber effect and the proliferation of junk data as well as propaganda. We are ill equipped to sort all the good information from the garbage coming out of the firehouse.
We’re not powerless; we are divided. Hence culture wars.
Division to the point of indolence is powerlessness.
We’re going to have to find a way to heal ourselves, including our neighbors. I’m not sure* how since some of them continue to inflict trauma then victim blame.
- edited
I wish there was and looked for the same until Covid, when I realized that the oligarch’s propaganda machine, all major media and a lot of education curriculum, that is used to keep us at each other’s throats by stoking division so we never unite against them, has grown so effective that even a non-partisan common enemy actively killing us completely failed and quickly became just another division wedge for enemies to disagree over for the sake of disagreeing, literally to the cartoonish degree that one side advocated taking precautions not to get sick, and the other side instinctually started screaming the opposite out of petty spite.
I wish reconciliation were possible, truly. That would have to start though with disempowering our capitalist owners poisoning our society to work against itself, because they control the media and our government since they succeeded in their decades long plan to legalize political bribery culminating in Citizens United. That was the last possible nail in fixing the system using the system.
Sometimes there isn’t a solution without pain felt by all. I believe our people will have to go hungry from the oligarch and induced climate change scarcity before we finally consider doing what needs to be done.
Until then, this is a class
waroccupation where the lower classes are encouraged to undermine one another by the ones that own all the bullhorns.We have to try something. We’re all we’ve got. Perhaps someone has resources for possible solutions we’re missing. Because we saw what happened with an attempted insurrection – and what didn’t happen.
Eta: you’re right about everything you said and I’m not sure we can even fathom the full scope of what that looks like. We’re talking almost three centuries of physical, emotional/psyc, spiritual (religions/beliefs), sexual, financial and any other kind of abuse they could conceive. Abu Gihrab/Gitmo are visceral horrors that we as a collective mostly recoiled at. This is centuries of insidious abuse, cptsd and I’m almost convinced most Spectrum B disorders without physical/genetic causes are thus caused — that means unless we don’t a) address the immediate concerns, because of J6 and what has and hasn’t happened since, and!
If the media publishes it, it serves their purposes beyond “oops, that’s embarrassing, admit it and cut to next story.”
I’m scared. I feel like I’m an aged video game character facing a real pit boss and my lifeline is red flashing. Perhaps some left of liberal user could point us to some resources, because guerrilla war is going to have to come at a logical, but viscerally hard-hitting angle. We don’t have time to deprogam ourselves and each other. We won’t, unless we come together now.*
- Disclaimer: seeing how things are going and did go with climate extinction, I fully expect the same. But I’m willing to give it the old try again and again anyway, so thanks if there are resources from people smarter than me.
I mean, sentiments do seem to be shifting, as we’re in later stage capitalism in which the problems are so blatant that they’re literally drowning people. So, I’d say that.
Ikr? We need an altruistic billionaire or few to be heroes. Oh wait, that’s an oxymoron.
techno feudalism is enslaving the capitalist class so they are a lot more likely to allow the peasants to access the social mobility that defines true capitalism now that it’s no escape
Are you kidding me? These are the people that had secret meetings about when the resource wars come, and they’re on their private islands, if shock collars would be effective in keeping their security personnel loyal.
It’s easier than ever before for anyone to get access to information.
And more people are starting to take a look behind the curtain.
This is how Cold Wars work.
Nice of the bankers to crawl out of their buckets to make a comment.
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