Lmfao, sorry (not sorry), I should have included feudalists too I guess, to avoid bootlicking pedants… 🙄
The point stands - war is waged for profit by profiteers, not by random civilians trying to live their lives, always was, always will be.
You misspelled “capitalists”.
This photo is actual nightmare fuel. 😫
I think that’s the point, just like with “a few bad apples”, the original intent of the saying has been subverted to help those in power keep the rest of us down (if you just do this impossible thing, you’ll be just like us! Why don’t you just do that impossible thing already, you useless lazy bastard? And so on. It’s part cognitive dissonance to make themselves feel like they’re “self made”, part gaslighting convincing us we’re just not trying hard enough).
I will remember survivorship bias
The just world fallacy is another one worth remembering, in the context of your post, but also generally.
Also
If hard work led to success, then a poor person working three jobs should be rich.
You got George Monbiot’s quote almost exactly word for word:
He didn’t have to work three jobs to pay rent, but he is set up as a rags-to-riches story, using elbow grease and grit to become the mogul he is.
Lastly, you’re right, but it’s important to remember what he does have, and why - privilege, and lots of it (being a white man from a rich background, with a supportive family to boot? They all put his starting points miles ahead of most others), which he is given by white supremacist patriarchal capitalism, which is why he (and many others, even without the billions, privilege is one hell of a drug) will never work to end those systems and work towards creating a world where everyone has equitable access and opportunity.
Capitalist propaganda.
“Aspiration” to be more precise, it’s one of the ways capitalists convince large segments of the public that they’re temporarily embarrassed millionaires, who just need to pull their bootstraps up hard enough, and they will make it, like the people in the programme did (conveniently they never address things like racism, sexism, queerphobia, ableism, and other barriers that many people have to face just to survive, never mind thrive, and the fact that all of these barriers are artificial and created by people who benefit just as much from dividing society up and pitting us against each other, as they do from selling us rags-to-riches bullshit to get us to work harder to make them money).
Oh, I was just making an observation, I’m definitely with you on this, a proper block would be much better,.
Not defending xitter, but that’s exactly how it works on lemmy, isn’t it? If I block someone I don’t see them anymore but they can still see and reply to me.
the original UN article
Someone linked it bellow: https://archive.is/MObDZ
The FEE article is garbage, but the original is like a broken clock, it makes a couple of valid points, but it doesn’t strike me as being written by an anti capitalist, but by someone who wants to reform capitalism.
How does the saying go? When your only tool is a hammer, every problem is a nail?
The only tool he has is what capitalism gave him - the idea that people will only work if threatened with starvation, homelessness, or other punishment.
The idea that the benefit of a community and society at large, and by direct extension - our own, could motivate people, or to be more precise, the idea that society would benefit everyone not just a “select” few, doesn’t even come in to consideration.
If only… But I suspect whatever happens in November, it isn’t going to be pleasing at all (to me as an anarchist, anyway), especially because it isn’t themselves they consume, like the hypothetical “intellectuals” on the desert island would, but the rest of us, and those most vulnerable first.
It is just so frustrating that people have been warning about exactly what is happening (not just with the DWP, mind), yet the general public just don’t want to hear it, the illusion of choice being so narrow makes life easy - you’re either team red or team blue (or maybe yellow or green if you’re feeling “rebellious”), and that’s all you need to know about the world (the result of being over worked, under paid, and propagandised since birth in to whatever benefits capitalism most, of course).
Step outside that box, and they become so overwhelmed by (or completely shut down to) the endless possibilities, they just don’t know how to deal with it. It’s so fucked up how well the system works at preserving itself.
Lmfao, I’d pay to watch them descend in to chaos as they insist on ranking each other by importance or whatever arbitrary measure of superiority they choose, because they simply can’t function otherwise, until they all end up dead from refusing to “lower” themselves to cooperate with “inferiors”.
Sure, but they shouldn’t be publishing this garbage either.
Sounds good at a glance, but when you look at the way he reaches that conclusion (that the threat of hunger is the only reason people are willing to work), and his solution (for a class of “intellectuals” like him to take charge) however, are just neoliberal swill…
OP really should have just linked the article:
And if you’re Black - get shot for “talking back”
I can understand that in some countries cops can be seen as criminals (and are behaving like criminals), but I don’t think a generality should be made. Just like a generality shouldn’t be made about people from an origin all doing the same bad thing.
ACAB, and you don’t get to compare your chosen profession to where people were born or the colour of their skin, nor try to claim victim points by pretending you are systemically oppressed and discriminated against in the same way we are (though your trying to does go to strengthen my first point).
Fuck you, pig.
We could elect people changing the system and there is nothing the 2k people could do…The reason the billionaires have so much power and protection is because a lot of people side with them and the system they support.
which one of your two options is offering to change the system? Who owns the media that propagandises the masses not to support such change because “cOMmUnISm” and instead be bombarded with “aspirational” content designed (at the cost of trillions of dollars) to make us overconsume? (E: depending on where you live there could of course be more than two options, but I guarantee none of the top contenders are there to change the system, those who do aim to, get slandered by the media long before they get to a position where they’re a serious threat to the status quo)
what we need to do is change the companies and the way to do that is legislation.
Who is legislating? And who do they actually serve (see above)
not a single billionaire yet still horrible pollution. Billionaires don’t cause pollution, people do.
Lmfao. It isn’t poor people who wage and fund war that leaves more poverty and destruction for them, and billions for those calling the shots. The fact that in one place at one time the people making the money weren’t local doesn’t change that.
Billionaires don’t cause pollution, people do.
Billionaires are people, people who use their vast power and money to maintain a system that is and always has been rigged in their favour, and that is designed to keep you trapped, along with the rest of us.
When my cat was a baby she got tangled by the neck in a blinds cord, thankfully I was right there, but it scared the shit out of me. I rent, and still (and everywhere else I’ve lived) have corded blinds, but the cords are now rolled up and tied to the top so they’re out of the way. This kind of regulation is a good thing.