Because we the sucker peasants of the west have largely been propagandized by the owner class from birth into embodying this meme:

Woah there cowboy,

We’re still closer to rival monkey tribes hurling our shit at one another as it exits our anuses than we are some benevolent civilization with noble pursuits like knowledge.

Don’t worry, a few more pointless world wars and population decimations born out of glorified sociopathy, and our species might actually develop admirable priorities beyond tribal resource hoarding from the ashes.

When humans are no longer interested in keeping up with some Kardashian descendant, perhaps we will have stumbled into an age of reason. Seems like as good an indicator as any.

Capitalism is feudalism with a marketing team.

Land/capital shouldn’t be more important than people. Economies are supposed to be lowly tool of a society to maximize the equitable and efficient distribution of goods and services within a society for the benefit of the citizens of said society, not a few thousand sociopath families at most of society’s expense as it is.

Our society (the US in my case, but increasingly the entire west) literally lives in perpetual servitude to one of its broken tools. A catastrophe should have leaders coming out saying they’ll take every measure to protect their people and society, not their fucking economy and it’s quarterly private profit expectations.

I use the “I just want to tell you (both/all) good luck, we’re all counting on you” line irl sometimes.

My humble dream is that one day, before I’m dead, someone will get it.

I’m against the death penalty in general, but I also acknowledge that in terms of tangible damage to humanity, any billionaire walking the Earth makes any serial killer who has ever walked the Earth seem positively quaint by scale.

I also recognize that we are living under class occupation. The owner class handily won the class war by convincing most of the developed world not to fight it half a century ago.

The peasants don’t have the luxury of taking prisoners. We are the losers of a war, in spite of the fact that many have come to worship their occupying oppressors.

Keeping the most destructive humans locked away and well fed until they die of natural causes is a peacetime luxury for those in charge, and unless you’re holding a reprehensible amount of capital, that isn’t us. You might believe we are in peacetime, but if we refuse to stop them, and it looks that way, they will force our shared, communal habitat to stop us all through their insatiable, sociopathic avarice.

We love to think we’re not, but we’re still subjects wholly dependant on this world, even the owners activily attacking us and it simultaneously.

We’re no less corrupt in the US, merely more expensive.

Our cheats just hire lobbyists to make their corrupt practices legal, shout out to Citizens United, and/or hire enough lawyers to make the consequences meaningless, like fining a company that makes billions a year thousands for profitable criminal activity.

Our “solution” to corruption is simply to make it legal for the right price. Donald Trump should have lost his empire and gone to jail for his business practices long before he was a game show host, let alone POTUS, but he learned and inherited enough from daddy to understand how to wield American style corruption, and he’s still free.

Since there’s no rational hope of addressing the other 3k or so billionaire parasites on Earth without building a really big Titanic wreckage tour sub and making little paths of stock certificates leading to it like reese’s pieces in ET, I’ll take whatever incidental vicarious revenge against humanity’s oppressors I can get.

There’s no good argument in allowing mergers of companies that are already large enough to be publicly traded at all.

Honestly the whole private shareholder parasite that produces nothing, aside from the chips from their last trip to the exploitation casino, and demands and gets almost every net cent of profit produced is the root cause of most of humanity’s great crises. Value/capital earned/made should be tied largely to the quantity/quality/expertise of contributed LABOR, not passive speculative investment, aka gambling, often with loaded market pressure dice and marked insider information cards.

There’s a damned good reason, prior to the Reaganomics/Jack Welch giveaway, that the normal business model was customers first, employees second, investors third: because without the first two no one makes anything, and the third only consumes and demands like petulant infants demanding a baba.

Now it’s investors first and only, which is not sustainable, just look around at all the mergers enshittifying every economic sector’s ability to produce the goods and services they existed to provide in the first place.

E

The fact that, even with the advent of digital records, humanity seems incapable of retaining the lessons of history gives me a a pessimistic outlook for our future.

It only took a single human lifespan for fascism to be on the rise again in Germany, and for their former victims to be undertaking their own final solution.

Same goes for the Great Depression here in the US, only took 50 years for the Reagan Revolution to hand all the power right back to the avarice ruled profiteer class to thunderous American applause, and many still act confused as to why that’s a catastrophe, as if bread lines and children/seniors literally starving to death in the streets, and yes we’re barreling back to that, was some kind of a fairy tale.

The Matrix

Lab grown meat is made differently than what feels comfortable and familiar to me, therefore continue raising animals for slaughter! Who cares if it’s cruel and a massive contributor to capitalist made climate change?

Charging a car takes longer than pumping gas, therefore keep using gas! Who cares if it’s destroying our ONLY habitat?

Reckless growth/metastasis for its own sake makes more profit for the right people. We need more wage slaves! Lets force the peasants to have more babies to drive up short term private profit! Who cares if the planet can’t support such a reckless species in these numbers and we’re sabotaging the medium-long term survival of our species(and countless others at our mercy we don’t give shit one about)?

Humanity is determined to destroy itself. Just smart enough to develop technologies capable of threatening our sole, shared, COMMUNal habitat we all rely on for every breath, still too bone-dead stupid to seriously consider using them responsibly with temperance.

I don’t see the problem. These peasant kids came out of peasant mothers. This is their sole purpose in life, generating capital for their economic betters in exchange for the minimal subsistence they’re benevolently permitted to exist under.

Kudos to my fellow peasants for ramping up capital battery maturation rates. It will be integrated into the owner’s quarterly earnings forecasts going forward.

That said, larger increases in earnings will of course be expected next quarter. Remember, you are expected to be happy to serve your economic betters, so smile around them so as not to make them feel any negative emotions about our subjugation, no matter your irrelevant internal feelings. Keeping our capitalists happy is its own reward. Live vicariously through their lives of lavish, modern Pharoah like gluttony.

That is all, my fellow batteries, and remember, if you’re reading this, why the FUCK aren’t you making our owners more money right now?!

Nah, everything seems right to them, they just plop the knife on the corpse after.

The NYT Strikes me as an organization that would rather attempt to continue to exist under Trump than try to fight the rising fascist tide he’s riding.

They’ve always been that high on themselves, and they’ve always been pragmatists to the point of standing for nothing except their own gravitas.

Thank you Scotty!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_oxynitride

I’m a leftist, not a libertarian, but I always feel compelled to bring up a specific point in Snowden’s defense when he is mentioned to divisive opinions:

He did speak up correctly, using the correct channels, and the proper channels told him to shut the fuck up.

Then he again did what he did the rightest way he could, by giving the data to one of the oldest members of the fourth estate, the press, to decide proper course, ONLY AFTER the primary state failed him spectacularly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Estate

“But sir! We still all need to breathe the Earth’s air!”

Then build me a climate change bunker in New Zealand with its own ventilation system! You can’t come. Line must go up!

Embracer joins TimeWarnerHBODiscoveryParamountSoonblahblahblah in confirming capitalism is in its terminal stage.

No unexploited markets in which to further to grow/metastasize, and entire economic sectors eating their own tails to be gutted of their ability to actually make the products/services their sector existed to provide in the first place for a short term stock bump celebrating cruelty.

This is a fire sale, and the capitalists know it. The worst bit is, it’s happening in every economic sector, even the life and death ones.

Granted.

Civilization collapses within hours as employers, employees, parents, and spouses provide long suppressed, at length honest answers of how it’s going to their employees, employers, children, and spouses who asked as usual as an empty platitude.