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I've been having some thoughts recently about the billionaires among us, some opinions, some takes even. My politics on this has evolved over time; at one point they were admirable titans of industry, then they were capitalist parasitic ticks, then they were a necessary part of the incentive structure that drives to economy, and now they are a bloated level of inefficiency preventing the market from functioning efficiently.
But over all this time, I've kinda synthesized a superstructure that I don't think is gonna change, that I think is not on the left right axis, but on another mysterious plane: I'm jealous of china. I think we're gonna have to steven universe meme one of these guys. I don't even really care who, and I don't care who does it. It could be Il Duce Trump, it could be General Secretary Mamdani, it could be some boring centrist whose name we don't know.
Anyone who imposes consequences on or limits the behaviors of the managing class would win my instant approval. This could just be because of my space autism getting triggered unimaginably by space-x getting fucking shackled to a corpse right before IPO/ Artemis being a big fucking waste of time and money* / Boeing doing boeing stuff, it could be the long 2008 hangover, it could be a thousand things.
I guess I'm just kinda over us deciding that once you reach a certain net worth, you are some sort of luminous being. You can go to pedo island and it's fine, you can do drugs that normies go to prison for an it's fine, you can fuck up critical national infrastructure and it's fine, you have infinite money when it's time to do what you want but somehow you have no money (or negative money!) when it's time to contribute to the public good.
I recall Luigi, and I recall the polling: people old enough to have been adults when a the post FDR wealth redistribution program was still around were very unfavorable; people who came into consciousness as the program was being fully unwound in the late 80s and 90s were split 50/50, and people who never experienced that social milieu were yelling "BASED BASED BASED!"
I really think that unless the uniparty plays it's cards right, the next realignment is not gonna be pretty for anyone. We need another FDR type to head that shit off like it's vanguardist communism in the 1930s, and at this point I don't think I care if they are left or right, they just need to be for the bottom and middle and even most of the top, and against the peak.
*Yes I know about pork. Pork can at least do something! highways can get build, parks are nice, and if we need to build bombs somewhere to it might as well be in bumfuck nowhere to give the nowhereians something to do other than meth.
Hi, I don't have much to add to the topic at hand, because 'billionaires have too much power/influence/XXX' is not super interesting to me. But I wanted to comment that I do not know what the 'Steven universe meme' is, and do not care to investigate it to figure out all its nuances. From what I can gather, this sentence:
was essential to your thesis, it may even be your thesis statement, and I have no idea what it means.
I understand everyone on this forum likes to write in this witty memetic style but please don't do so at the expense of clarity. /soapbox
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-think-were-gonna-have-to-kill-this-guy-steven
See now I'm even more confused. OP is suggesting we kill US politicians because they're irredeemable? Is he saying Trump, but also Mamdani, is literally Hitler? What does this have to do with China?
Point stands. Don't use memes as your thesis. Use your big boy words!
It's not so much about the meme as it is about he plausible deniability, I'd wager. Understanding that our government has a panipticon that may be at any moment oriented toward you in particular, sometimes it's necessary to clarify that you're only proposing we do radical things in minecraft.
It's amazing to me that so many people are convinced the federal government is some mythical creature that you can bewitch by reciting the right incantation. Like, FBI agents and federal prosecutors and judges (and juries, for the most part) are perfectly capable of reading context clues. Circumstantial evidence and reasonable inferences are 100% admissible in court. If you're on their radar, no amount of clever internet code-talk is going to save you. Even before the panopticon, that shit wouldn't fly.
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