Conservatives are the people outside of the last frame encouraging the cops to step more on the neck region.
I like that this also illustrates how pointless a million extra layers of boxes are for improving anyone's life.
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2024
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It also does not illustrate what motivates a billionaire. It just makes their behaviour seem totally irrational which does not do you any favours.
It is irrational but the same sort of irrational everyone is. Monkey need to survive winter so monkey stocks up on food/resources. Monkies never needed a ceiling for this behavior as there was never enough food. Now you have apes with a billion winters worth of stockpile yet that voice in their heads is still as loud as ever.
No, I think you’re mistaken. I don’t think they feel that way at all. I think billionaires keep going because they are competitive. They want to win! And they often lose unfathomable amounts of money in the process, which they don’t care about. Survival brain does not shrug off huge losses so casually.
The other reason they keep going is because they want power. They’re used to being in charge and they hate when others have power over them. They’re subject to all kinds of scrutiny and they’re afraid when political power is leveraged against them. So they do what comes natural to them: try to leverage what they have for more power (and more wealth, which brings more power with it).
Competitiveness was also part of the survival brain, it allowed monkey to perform better. Also male mating partners are usually selected that way (who has the most food, is the strongest etcetera), so the more competitive monkeys would have more likely started the next generation .
I think the idea that billionaires are created by any kind of motive is the wrong lens.
Their wealth doubles faster if they lack egalitarian values. So the millionaires who end up becoming billionaires are the ones who lack egalitarian values.
The values they do hold could be anything from, "everyone wants to win; I'm just winning harder" to "God told me to" and it won't matter as long as they keep reinvesting and growing their wealth faster than the economy or ecosystem can sustain.
What we're witnessing right now is not a set of ideas or beliefs, but an exponential growth equation -- with all of the overwhelming speed and transformative power such an equation carries.
Exponential growth is the reason for everything from the mammoths' extinction to rotten food and the lethality of cancer. It transforms entire systems, outgrowing (and often destroying) its own host.
If your society has currency but lacks any chemotherapy / surgery to remove concentrations of the aforementioned currency that start growing at a cancerous rate...
Then it won't matter what values are common or uncommon: your society is eventually doomed.
It could take a hundred years or a thousand, but eventually, a pile of wealth will emerge that multiplies until it consumes everything.
Dare I say it: you two are possibly both correct. Human behavior is complex and multifactorial. More than one or two drivers can influence behavior.
It's a mix of 'losing touch with value if you have lots' and validated 'more = feel good' and competitive behavior.
In short, irrational.
I get the thought, but capitalism is the fence, the reason people need boxes just to watch the game in the first place.
I really really hate the original version of this meme. No one uses equality, equity, and justice to mean the things the meme implies >:|
What do you mean no one uses those terms that way?
Not in this meme, but in the original. It implies that equality is not a good thing because surely the people calling for it haven't taken into account that everyone is different and has different needs. It shows equity as being the same situation but tailored for everyone's needs, and justice as being the same situation but with whatever created the inequality in the first place as having been removed.
My issue is that people don't use these words in this way, the people calling for equality always want to provide according to peoples needs, and to remove the things causing inequality.
I hear ya. I feel ya. 👍❤️
That's a good point. What do you think better words to use would be?
Evenness, Equality, Justice
I think it depends a lot on the people using the words. People who don't believe that the systematized slavery as practiced in the US produced long-lasting generational effects, for example, might say that treating people equally moving forward is best. Under that belief system, everyone starts on ~even footing and gets the same opportunities, so actually it's less fair to make special cases for folks!
In my view those folks are starting from a deeply flawed premise (and usually one they've arrived at in order to justify the worldview they already hold), so their conclusions are worthless. But I think they'd meet the criteria of advocating for equality and against equity, and sincerely mean it. It's not hypothetical either, I've met people like this - depressingly many, in fact.
No-one disagrees with you. I think the point being made is that people who mean equity still call it equality. Until seeing this post I didn't even know the word equity has this context and this difference to equality and I'm almost 50.
When most common folk say they support equally I would argue they mean the middle panel of this meme where everyone gets to see.
I just don't agree that most folks mean the middle panel. It really depends who and where you ask. A lot of people have - for example - a big problem with Affirmative Action because it looks like the middle panel - different help given to different people.
I'd draw the man with the million boxes using just the one to see over the fence.
He's blue shirt guy, who didn't even need one to see over it.
This is american version of capitalism (meaning it is oligarchy, not capitalism).
A fundamental principle of capitalism is competition. In US, lobbying (aka legal bribery) has eliminated competition. So it has changed from capitalism to oligarchy.
Norway is also capitalistic, but everyone is rich there. US could and would have been there if politicians were not sold.
Capitalism and being an oligarchy are neither mutually exclusive nor mutually inclusive, nor is the presence or absence of competition neither mutually inclusive or exclusive of oppression of others for gain. One could argue, though, that capitalism tends to eventually lead to oligarchies and, as the graphic suggests, oppression for gain as these are both strategies to maximize gain and the capitalist operator with the most gain can use that gain to further increase future gain, and so on. This can lead to the systematic selection for oligarchic, oppressive capitalists.
Norway is rich, like many other countries, due to its economic oppression of the global South. While its distribution of that wealth is more equitable than the United States, it still relies on the same system of oppression to accrue disproportionate wealth.
What I am reading from your comment is: Norway is not perfect, therefor the argument you were replying to is invalid or diminished. Might not be what you intended, but that's what it reads like.
I don't think oppression of the global south is a valid criticism of Norway. I do think the things Norway needs to improve upon are largely similar to things the US has to improve upon. Only Norway is miles ahead in many of these key aspects.
Like corruption, most Norwegians want less corruption.
Equity, most Norwegians think there is not enough equity
Healt care and welfare, most Norwegians think people don't get good enough help with low enough friction
Of course there are more points, and some points don't have overlap.
Put bluntly, most of the logic in the argument I'm replying to sounds good but doesn't hold up under scrutiny. It presents two false dichotomies as explanation for issues with capitalism. Hence the first paragraph, explaining why those associations are false.
Then I address Norway in the second paragraph, which is given as an example of "good capitalism".
What I am reading from your comment is: Norway is not perfect, therefor the argument you were replying to is invalid or diminished. Might not be what you intended, but that's what it reads like
I'm not sure how you're getting that. I asked my coworker to give it a read without explaining my thesis and they don't see it either. You don't explain why, so I'm at a loss.
I don't think oppression of the global south is a valid criticism of Norway.
Why not? You again don't explain why, so again I'm unsure what you intend beyond "your writing sucks and you're wrong". Give me some substance I can actually respond to!
I don't think oppression of the global south is a valid criticism of Norway
You not thinking so doesn't make it less true. Norway engages in unequal exchange every bit as much as the USA.
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Norway is also capitalistic, but everyone is rich there. It's pretty good here, but not that good.
Wage inequality is way lower here in Norway than in most of the world, but it's unfortunately on the rise, in addition to right wing politics becoming increasingly prevalent. Things are good here because inequality was always low, and therefore unions could "win", unlike in the US where unions were successfully opposed by powerful corporations.
Norway is slowly becoming worse, but way slower than the rest of the world because unions and the welfare state stops foreign and domestic companies from exploiting us as much as they want to.
REAL capitalism hasn't been tried it's just a theory those countries aren't really capitalism they just call themselves capitalism.
People like you mock those on the left using similar arguments all the time....
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Curiously in Economics 101 circa 1985, there was a whole section on wealth disparity, featuring a graph with a diagonal line (perfect distribution), and the plotted chart that bowed underneath that line, showing how much extra wealth the rich have over the poor. When the area between those two lines gets too large, it leads to all the shit we hate about capitalism: suffering, regulatory capture, eventually state failure and civil war (followed by famine and pestilence).
The point of the section was don't let this happen. And the state was supposed to do anything necessary to preserve a low disparity, or a pretty even distribution.
And by a pretty even distribution something like the richest people having 100x the average wealth, and the poorest having 1/100 the average wealth, so there's a significant amount of latitude.
These days, the top three richest have more money than the bottom 160 million poorest in the US. So we are well beyond the civil-war and failing state points.
But then the state is failing and civil war may be imminent.
Econ 101 is designed to obfuscate the real issues. Even talking about specific wealth distribution ratios is falling for the misframing of the issues that Econ 101 wants to lead people into with the pie metaphor. In the capitalist firm, the employer holds 100% of the property rights for the produced outputs and liabilities for the used-up inputs while workers qua employees get 0% of that. The entire division of the pie metaphor in Econ 101 is based around hiding this fact
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Under socialism, the tower belongs to The People, and is used by their representatives in the Party.
Socialism doesn't dictate a government structure, there's authoritarian socialism and there's anarchist socialism and there's socialism in-between.
What's ironic about your point is that you're advocating for a literally authoritarian economic system where the owning class dictates what laborers do. You spend most of your waking hours working for a dictator.
Socialism is about making the economy worker owned and giving the workers control over what gets produced and how. That could be via worker cooperatives, it can be via anarchism, it can be via an authoritarian state that (claims to) represent the worker.
Socialism doesn’t dictate a government structure
I disagree! Socialism by definition requires the people to own their own homes and the places where they work, which is difficult in a government not run by the people. Socialism must be democratic, anything else is just red fascism.
it can be via an authoritarian state that (claims to) represent the worker.
I may have been hasty, seems you agree! But I would like to stress that any government which claims to be socialist but makes unions illegal and enforces capitalism and private property shouldn't really get to call itself socialist or communist. They're just state capitalist oligarchies.
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I'm sure people will get along without a government, or social services
oh hey there's the trivial argument I was expecting... I'm not going to debate this (at an elementary school level) with you but you might consider that anarchists thought of that believe it or not. You can choose to educate yourself, or you can feel smug.
The irony is dripping
ok educate me
Humans existed for well over 200,000 years without government. There is strong evidence of massive settlements that existed for extended periods without any sign of being ruled, just people living and cooperating.
In fact, it's the formation of governments that could enforce exploitative economic systems that started the ecological collapse of this planet in the first place. Humans without government live in balance with the rest of the world.
The idea that humans, to survive and thrive, require the formation of an entity (government/state) that allows the subset of the population in control of the it to exploit the subset not in control of it is a dangerous fallacy.
There is strong evidence of massive settlements that existed for extended periods without any sign of being ruled, just people living and cooperating.
Do you have further reading on this?
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Zizek has a joke like that:
in Russia, members of the nomenklatura ride in expensive limousines, while in Yugoslavia, ordinary people themselves ride in limousines through their representatives.
used by their representatives in the Party
Nah, mate. Not the USSR nor Cuba were like this. You simply couldn't find wealth disparities in those countries as you can in modern capitalist ones, not even remotely close.
Hey, USA isn't the only capitalist country in the world!
But the most extreme. They literally go to war for capitalism.
Most conservatives are the child in the red shirt telling the cops to stomp harder on the child in the purple shirt, because the guy in the blue shirt told them that's who stole their box.
well urss was exactly like the third option, the problem isn't capitalism/communist is lack of functional democracy
Every time I see equality vs equity I want to draw equality vs equity vs cooperation response, where in equality scenario one person sees match, in equity none and in cooperation all, where one is on shoulders of other and third is on two boxes.
I would of done capitalism where the billionaire has all the boxes then showed three people fighting over one box.
idk if fighting would make sense. i dont see people fighting to get eachother's salary, i see people suffering for not having enough money to live a healthy life or working together to live a good enough life (example: a person not able to afford both rent and food vs living in a house with someone, making both food and rent possible even if still not enough).
so either i'd make it 2 people who need 2 boxes to see, but each only has 1 box and theres another person who has hundreds of boxes;
or 2 people on top of the same 2 boxes and a rich guy again with hundreds of boxes.
We live in a society
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