Capitalism - Blog Posts
the distortion of "there is potential profit we did not earn" as "there is money we lost" is fascinating and disgusting to me. "megamediaconglomerate lost $1,000,000,000 to piracy this year" is a flat out lie. it is not true. they did not have a billion dollars, that they now do not have. they felt entitled to one billion dollars, that they did not have, and still do not have. it's an infuriating perversion of the truth
May 31 2016 - Collin Kennedy, who is a cancer patient, used expanding spray foam to disable a parking meter at the Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg where he gets his treatment. He says the fees are a tax on the sick. [video]
Let's have the conversation about UBI.
Let the actual data and facts end the bad faith arguments.
Do your duty!
hey let's all do this on March 15th. on the website.
Hey don’t just like. Reblog.
If ur highkey pissed off that eco-activism is constantly written off as reefer hippie bullshit so much so that even the lower class, who would normally benefit from it, are willing to push this false narrative of giving a fuck about the earth being bad or embarassing, all because the capitalists who brainwash them would sooner watch it die than lose a single dollar, and it all makes you sick to your fucking stomach, clap your hands
it’s so funny when capitalists are like Stopping climate change is TOO EXPENSIVE. like money isn’t even fucking real you know what is? Earth and you know what’s about to not be real anymore? Earth
Apply independently produced drug to the burnt area
Little flag they put on little carts for children at the store. It is gross and disheartening in its truth. This is what children are in United States capitalism.
let’s be honest though, millennial hate is totally a thing rich folks started because they’re pissed that we have really unpredictable consumer habits and it isn’t as easy to get us to buy into stuff, so they’re mad we aren’t just money giving/traditional economy supporting machines like they expected us to be
like look at how much millennial hate articles are things like “millennials aren’t eating cereal and it’s hurting the cereal industry” or “millennials aren’t buying houses and that’s bad” or “millennials #1 utmost priority isn’t trying to make as much money as possible” and rich folks are mad about it, so just posturing our unpredictability/nontraditional values as “laziness” gets everyone else on board the hate train in some weird attempt to collectively subdue us
there is literally a revolution going on and i just,,, have to do my math homework
me, asking raymond to come to my island only so i sell him for 100 nook miles tickets: listen i don’t like capitalism but i gotta work within the system
It’s not lost on me that Bernie Sanders is the only mainstream politician touring the country rn listening to Americans’ concerns, giving them hope that a better world is still possible. Not campaigning for President, not an election year, just inspiring swing town voters to use their power to incite change in their communities.
Bernie is 83yo, doing the work that every single Democrat could be doing simply in their own district. He’s packing overflow rooms by the thousands in suburban and rural towns, not “democratic strongholds”. It is possible to get through the next four years but the status quo Dems aren’t going to make that happen.
Imagine what a true progressive party could do for the US. Leftist policy is popular and wins elections. Bernie and others have told us this for decades. If you tuned out his message before, I have to wonder what side you’re truly on. Because his shtick has not wavered with everyday Americans.
Not me, us.
i think i could kill elon and get away with it personally
It's funny that antiwork is such a haunting presence in our society, almost a constructed devil for our society that represents everything we fear, that people feel the need to bring it up as a negative label even when it's totally irrelevant to the topic (like here)
(I wonder if the second person loves or hates the idea of nobody having to work? I get the impression it's the second... Either way, it's a ridiculous response)
back to school shopping (i steal various stationary from big companies)
Gen Z and are so funny to me (another gen z) because they're like "we are against CAPITALISM ! we are the rebel generation !" but they'll defend porn (a capitalist industry based on the exploitation of women), prostitution (a capitalist industry based on the exploitation of women), makeup (a capitalist industry based on women's insecurities and sexist beauty standards), cosmetic surgery (a capitalist industry based on women's insecurities and sexist beauty standards), transition surgery (a capitalist industry based on using the issues of dysphoric and gender non conforming people to make money), fashion industry (a capitalist industry based on the exploitation of thousands of people and that's harmful for the planet) and like thousands of other capitalist shits. it isn't an anti capitalism generation. it's a very pro capitalism generation. they just use all these capitalist things (porn, prostitution, makeup, surgeries, fashion) to paint an anti capitalism aesthetic, an illusion, a look (based on their appearance, their content on social medias) to look anti capitalists, but they are not. if they were, they wouldn't think it's okay to traffick, exploit and sell women as objects, they wouldn't think it's okay to maintain and spread sexist beauty standards to push women to buy your products/surgeries because now they feel insecure about their face and body, they wouldn't keep supporting and industry that exploits other people and hurts their planet, they wouldn't support an ideology that tells you to alter your body by selling you lies about how you are born in the wRoNg one and need to pay to be your true self.
it's an aesthetic for them, they want to look cool and rebel and revolutionnary, but they support capitalism. and misogyny. (but but but it's EMPOWERING)
I hate how my biggest goals in life rn are to have a steady 9-5 that doesn't completely mentally drain me, and allows me to have an actual life work balance, live in my own 1 bedroom apartment with no roommates, where I can eat healthy homecooked food and actually own a functioning car I can drive. Why the fuck is that considered a wild dream nowadays? This was literally the standard/minimum like 20 years ago. Wtf. I don't want to do this anymore this whole world is bullshit why are human dignity(and rights) becoming a pipedream
Not to be a hater but I genuinely hate the fact that people get disability checks for stuff like autism when I'm here, suffering crippling depression and dysphoria, as well as a health condition that makes endurance and stamina incredibly hard, juggling college classes, a job, and general life maintenance because I live alone, relying on financial aid for college students that disappears the moment I graduate(or get kicked out), and then my minimum wage job.
Idk, it just almost feels offensive to be juggling all that, when there's people who claim disability checks because they just find it so hard to talk to people, or because they're unable to focus on anything, and then they just sit on their ass and play videogames in their childhood bedroom all day, or in the free housing apartment they got.
People will call me jealous, and, well, yeah? Of course? Like wym somebody is getting free housing, free insurance, and free income while just sitting at home all day, when I'm constantly managing all the aforementioned and I get told to "just man up"
Fuck all the way off. I'll never support neets no matter how much they claim they're "fighting the system". You're an adult baby, and it's time to grow the fuck up.
Dear capitalism,
buying anything besides groceries makes me physically sick
beat that
Forever hating how a big portion of the internet is inaccessible to me because of some stupid shit I did at 16.... like do these mega tech corps realize how long "forever" is?
I can't have reddit on my phone. When on pc, I can almost never post or comment and hope it goes through the spam filter and automod. Discord is extremely limited to me and I can't participate in any server that requires phone authentication, which are a lot of big (official) servers.
I can already hear people complain "hurr durr, you don't need reddit and discord to survive", but can we at least recognize how fucked up it is to permanently lock people out of such big parts of the internet, especially with no way to appeal? I kinda jokingly sent an appeal for a 4 year old ban recently and they still rejected me, though I doubt a human even looked at it.
On top of that, discord and reddit nowadays are huge sources of information. Yes, they both have their dark and grim sides, but also a lot of information and communication goes through there. And I can't access that ever again because of some stupid shit I did at 16. Tell me that's not censorship and tech corps going on a power trip.
Rabbits manage their predators
We've all seen the graph of lynx and snowshoe hares where the rabbit populations increase and lynx increase with larger litters and increased survival to adulthood in response to the abundance of food. Eventually the lynx outpace the rabbits and eat all the available rabbits and starve themselves to death back down to numbers that can survive on the number of available rabbits at which point the hares, being R strategists can reproduce faster than K strategist lynx and the whole cycle starts over again.
It's used as a classic example in ecology courses of predators preventing prey populations from overwhelming a landscape. And we see it as a cautionary tale about the need for good stewardship of resources and need for population control to prevent the suffering of boom and bust cycles.
That story is not quite accurate. The people who came up with that interpretation where all children of privilege and identified with the predators. It wasn't until more scientists from indigenous and lower-class groups began to make up the ranks that we questioned that story.
The hares are actively starving out their predators through solidarity.
When stress levels build up in hares from constantly being hunted and close escapes, this changes their reproductive system to have much smaller litters. Even when stressed individuals mate with outside hares, they have small litters and males somehow induce their unstressed mate to produce smaller litters even if she would otherwise have produced a large litter.
The entire population of hares effectively withholds their bodies from the predators by not reproducing beyond just enough to keep the species alive while laying low for long enough to starve the majority of their predators to death and force them to have smaller litters in response.
It seems to me there is a lesson in there for us in the midst of Capitalism. Stop having kids and starve the system of labor.
Then let the invisible hand of supply and demand do its magic to raise wages and reduce housing prices.
You can't afford to strike. They might fire you if you slow down too much (I still think a national slowdown is a safe bet). But they can't do jack to you for not breeding (yet).
So focus on your career and having fun and living a life of service to make a better future.
I grew up in a country that was once part of the communist block. I see the damage it has done, I despise it.
I also experience the awful reality of capitalism. I hate that too.
I am a socialist, I don't want to burn the house down just because there are bad people in it.
It would mean to take the risk of burning the paintings, the books, the piano, the chicken coop, the innocent child, the kind gardener and the lovely housekeeper too.
Because people have a tendency to get carried away.
People seriously have to learn the difference between socialism and communism
“When I was 26, I went to Indonesia and the Philippines to do research for my first book, No Logo. I had a simple goal: to meet the workers making the clothes and electronics that my friends and I purchased. And I did. I spent evenings on concrete floors in squalid dorm rooms where teenage girls—sweet and giggly—spent their scarce nonworking hours. Eight or even 10 to a room. They told me stories about not being able to leave their machines to pee. About bosses who hit. About not having enough money to buy dried fish to go with their rice.
They knew they were being badly exploited—that the garments they were making were being sold for more than they would make in a month. One 17-year-old said to me: “We make computers, but we don’t know how to use them.”
So one thing I found slightly jarring was that some of these same workers wore clothing festooned with knockoff trademarks of the very multinationals that were responsible for these conditions: Disney characters or Nike check marks. At one point, I asked a local labor organizer about this. Wasn’t it strange—a contradiction?
It took a very long time for him to understand the question. When he finally did, he looked at me like I was nuts. You see, for him and his colleagues, individual consumption wasn’t considered to be in the realm of politics at all. Power rested not in what you did as one person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large, organized, and focused movement. For him, this meant organizing workers to go on strike for better conditions, and eventually it meant winning the right to unionize. What you ate for lunch or happened to be wearing was of absolutely no concern whatsoever.
This was striking to me, because it was the mirror opposite of my culture back home in Canada. Where I came from, you expressed your political beliefs—firstly and very often lastly—through personal lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism. By shopping fair trade and local and boycotting big, evil brands.
These very different understandings of social change came up again and again a couple of years later, once my book came out. I would give talks about the need for international protections for the right to unionize. About the need to change our global trading system so it didn’t encourage a race to the bottom. And yet at the end of those talks, the first question from the audience was: “What kind of sneakers are OK to buy?” “What brands are ethical?” “Where do you buy your clothes?” “What can I do, as an individual, to change the world?”
Fifteen years after I published No Logo, I still find myself facing very similar questions. These days, I give talks about how the same economic model that superpowered multinationals to seek out cheap labor in Indonesia and China also supercharged global greenhouse-gas emissions. And, invariably, the hand goes up: “Tell me what I can do as an individual.” Or maybe “as a business owner.”
The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t do anything. In fact, the very idea that we—as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals—could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system, or changing the global economy, is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together. As part of a massive and organized global movement.
The irony is that people with relatively little power tend to understand this far better than those with a great deal more power. The workers I met in Indonesia and the Philippines knew all too well that governments and corporations did not value their voice or even their lives as individuals. And because of this, they were driven to act not only together, but to act on a rather large political canvas. To try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor laws in an entire country of millions. Their sense of individual powerlessness pushed them to be politically ambitious, to demand structural changes.
In contrast, here in wealthy countries, we are told how powerful we are as individuals all the time. As consumers. Even individual activists. And the result is that, despite our power and privilege, we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small—the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood or town. Meanwhile, we abandon the structural changes—the policy and legal work— to others.”
- Naomi Klein
My sister just said “We’re all gonna die because people are stupid and want to go to college and have parties” and I looked over at her and said “We’re all gonna die because corporations value profit over lives - and so does the government”
What more foolish than to believe happiness is the ultimate ambition of a society whose very foundation is built upon a thwarted craving for meaning and its pillars insatisfaction ? Unhappiness and insufficiency are the driving forces behind economic expansion. The horror of contentment, the very notion of it is injurious to capitalism. So, in a way, a constant search for and accumulation of wealth is equated with success and to not deliriously overwork oneself in the name of ambition becomes failure, or as an excellently absurd term puts it ‘wasted potential’. Perhaps the implication here that any ability to create or produce is disqualified to be of any value unless it is yielded in a way enabling it to be monetised is collectively unacknowledged by society, or consciously endorsed. A bit of prodding into this brings one to the despaired question. What indeed is humankind’s core want? Or in other words, what would compel a thinking person to serve bureaucracy if their fundamental need were met and a decent standard of living provided?
Also another thing that bothers me is the quasi-philosophical belief that suffering is somehow superior to happiness in both meaning and virtue. The dreadfulness of pain masquerades as intellectualism and, to borrow a phrase from LeGuin, the banality of evil is wrapped up in folds of mystery. The ideology that ‘suffering should be endured for the potential of a reward later’ (and not to seek any meaning in itself, which, although questionable is a manifold better reason to engage in masochism) is one that is encouraged and spread by those in power. This is an abuse of religion and an exploitation of people’s values done more or less solely for the purpose of keeping people perceived beneath them in check. This state of affairs is more prevalent than it appears to be at first glance and is a disgrace to the few who actually work for the welfare of people. This has been a rant. Thank you.