Huffing my steam deck fumes, getting the munchies and eating the single hot chip and washing it down with the panera lemonade.
betelgeuse
joined 2 years ago
Wonderful has $3.6 billion dollars worth of agricultural land in California. They also own a lot of water rights in the state. The water restrictions you hear about? Guess why it's hard to get water to all the houses that have popped up over the last couple of decades.
They did this with Iran and pistachios too. The Wonderful company lobbied to stop imports of Iranian pistachios because they were competition.
He thought we could overcome problems by using capitalism. He was a true believer, not just a wealthy cynic. We would be the commies by introducing them to Coke-a-cola and blue jeans. We would solve imperialism by liberalizing previously occupied and having them join the world economy. He still wasn't okay with having an alternative to capitalism. In a way he was a further abstraction of problems, not a counter to them. If he had continued we would continue to see imperialism, just by more abstract means. And eventually we'd still learn that you can't have both, that the exploitation will be enforced by violence regardless of how it's sold to the West.
Israel is not Judaism and it's not an ethnic group by your own admission. The idea that the Jewish people employ dark magic rituals that murder and consume children is antisemitic. The idea that the police and military of Israel, with the public at broad's supports, kills children in the interest of national security is not.
We can distinguish between the two. You don't seem to separate them, which is antisemitic.
When the materialism kicks in
We'll have tea in the pusary
US collapse is going to be slow. We're going to dwindle into corrupt fiefdoms led by various wealthy families and individuals. These people will be in various overt states of war and treaty, just like olden times. As it becomes more obvious we are nothing like the liberal ideal of America, they will further entrench themselves in patriotic and nationalist decoherence. Some will perform a ritual where they dress up as the Founders and pretend to be them, warping history around their present. Some will turn to Lincoln, JFK, Obama as the focus of their nationalist emanation. These strange outbursts of black comedy will be punctuated by bouts of violence. Domestic terrorist attacks, organized crime.
We'll slowly become a reflection of our projections against the global south. A third-world country with world-leading poverty and a corrupt government funded by foreign capitalists trying to keep The American Project going long enough to finally defeat communism.
Just spelling it all out. Wage slavery is just an abstraction of slavery that actually benefits the burgeoise.
A lot of the things they say make me go “wait fucking wat”, and on some level that’s a good thing
Did you know that the US once tried to import hippos as a source of meat, as an alternative to cows?
The purpose of your life is to be a productive asset for people who make their living owning productive assets. They are in charge of the government and the economy and will never vote themselves out. They will kill to maintain their status as owners of productive assets because they do not want to become owned by someone else. They do spend a lot of time making sure you're over stimulated because not only do you make the product for them you also buy the product from them. You're a little blood bag in multiple ways and they are leeches.
They need you to vote for them, to make their actions legitimate so the whole thing doesn't erupt in violence and get them killed. The most effective way to do that is to build a bunch of windmills at which you'll tilt. They can't make you hate other people for owning productive assets, so they have to come up with other reasons. And those reasons also have to work in their favor, as in make you hate their competition and enemies. You hate their enemies, who also own productive assets, but you hate them for largely abstract reasons detached from the actual reality of your exploitation. This dissonance creates malaise unless you feel like you're discovering a deeper truth by buying into more propaganda. You get on another dopamine treadmill which ultimately leaves you unsatisfied no matter how angry you get. Because it's never about recognizing your actual situation.
They need you to keep making product for them, because if you run out of product to make, they lose their livelihood. You also need to keep buying product. They sell you everything you need, making sure there's as many people between it and you as possible, each extracting some profit. This causes friction which causes malaise. Once everyone has everything they need, they don't sell as much product. This is bad so they invent need, they try to make you want stuff so you keep buying. This means they need more productive assets like yourself, this grows their empire. They come up with more abstractions for why you're unhappy and how buying product will satisfy you. But with the accumulation you are still left unfulfilled.
This isn't new and owning productive assets isn't as profitable as it used to be. You need more and more to make the same amount of money, to keep the same amount of power. So the expansion and accumulation of more involves people like yourself being made miserable. They need war to go into other places and take over those productive assets. They need you to be on board for war so they have to demonize the other productive assets like yourself. They need you to fight in the war so you lose your friends and family. But to make up for that they abstract that exploitation away with fictions as well.
A society that allows a few people to collectively own all or most productive assets (ie, labor) will always result in this malaise. It will never bring you contentment. And if, by some chance, you get to own productive assets are now happy because you're free from being owned, millions of others will take your vacancy from the working class. So you're happy but they are not and their discontent will ultimately bring conflict, which makes you unhappy again.
Human experience is not profitable, or I should say, it is. As you've noticed, the amount of human experience you can afford or make time for is almost none. Your entire human experience is consumption and production. Even when you have fun you must consume product. You must pay a series of people who own the productive assets that produce your enjoyment. Reality is not helpful to the owners of productive assets. It just gets in the way.
You can't imagine an alternative because the prospect of another promise of freedom from being owned is just too scary. You're better to go with the devil you know.
You're not unhappy because you're possessed with bad spirits. You're not unhappy because of some abstraction living across the ocean that exists to threaten your other coveted abstractions. You're unhappy for a precise and easily explainable material reason. That reason is that you are exploited and are actively prevented from stopping it. You are manipulated into believing that exploitation is actually freedom. So in chasing freedom you either further exploit yourself or exploit others, adding to the general friction of society and life, causing misery.
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