If billionaires didn't care what we thought, they wouldn't be using their news corps 24 hours a day to distract us about where the REAL source of our pain comes from.
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2024
249 points (99.2% liked)
United States | News & Politics
7310 readers
649 users here now
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
I don't believe this crap for a second - they can afford all the security they need to protect themselves. I think this is an attempt at manipulation to keep us at bay for a while until we cool off & resume living like before this happened, so they can continue doing what they've been doing all the while knowing that they shouldn't push much further for now.
Let's face it - human attention spans are short, and in three months or so this will be pushed back in most people's minds as they continue dealing with their day-to-day struggles. This messaging is designed to make us feel "heard" so we wait to see what happens rather than risk our lives on taking further action, but after a while nothing will have changed & it'll all be the same as before.
Remember two things:
- Their security are working class, no matter how you slice it. They only way you can avoid them turning on you/abandoning you is if they have undying loyalty to you. And that is very rare and very hard to maintain.
- Capitalism is inherently unsustainable. So collapse can only be delayed, not avoided. Eventually, the plethora of self-defeating aspects of Capitalism will become more than any of the elite can suppress or mitigate. Hopefully labor is ready at that point to rise up and take back what has been stolen, and recreate the institutions as a socialist structure, owned and controlled by the workers.
Having been both military and security, I will tell you that while military, my position was MUCH harder for me to ignore. As security, I could easily say "fuck this, it isnt worth it." In the military, the job (in ones head) is the security of the nation and the people around you. As security, you're more likely to have a family, and at some point you're like "I wanna see my family again, $20/hr isn't worth not seeing my kid again". As security, you're essentially a mercenary. You have no ideological points for it, it's just a check. Security almost never has a situation where it becomes "this issue is something worth dying for". That's simply absurd. Even if I'm making $50/hr for Jeff bezos, there's an amount of discontent that I'm not willing to deal with just for his safety, and that's before you consider your own personal opinions/ideals/objections. Historically speaking, buying security is iffy at best.
I don’t believe this crap for a second
Which crap don’t you believe?
This messaging is designed to make us feel “heard”
Whose messaging? Michael Parenti’s? Caitlin Johnstone’s? Peter Thiel’s? Piers Morgan’s?
after a while nothing will have changed & it’ll all be the same as before.
As I’ve already said elsewhere in this post, one difference will be that the expansion of the security state/police state will be accelerated.
I think it’s a bit silly to think their security will protect them indefinitely. They have to be perfect 100% of the time, where someone else only has to be lucky once.
I think you're underestimating the amount of Luigies there are. And I think this probably has woke a lot of them up.
This is the real answer. The rich know it's just like school shootings. One can trigger several in a short period and they're terrified of that.
They’re not worried only about stochastic terrorism. They’re also worried that we’ll become an organized & militant labor movement and gain some political power. Or worse still, that we’ll seize the means of production and depose them.
I agree with you but I don't think that last point is where this is going. There won't be any seizing of the means of production. That just isn't happening in America, and is arguable if it's ever really happened ever, anywhere. Power has transferred, but never to the people. However, they are worried that people have had enough of their shit. It's very difficult to start a revolution. It's much easier (as evidenced) to kill one guy and make the rest live in fear.
That just isn’t happening in America
It’s almost definitely not going to happen while the US is still the global hegemon. I think the US empire will have to further unravel before this can become even a slim possibility.
and is arguable if it’s ever really happened ever, anywhere. Power has transferred, but never to the people.
From Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds:
But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this “pure socialism” view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.
The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.
The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundaments as to leave little opportunity for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they “feel betrayed” by this or that revolution.
It’s much easier (as evidenced) to kill one guy and make the rest live in fear.
Yes, it’s a helluva lot easier. But those people who live in fear also live in power. They have the state’s monopoly on violence at their disposal, and they’ve captured the regulatory bodies, they fund/bribe the politicians, they fund the NGOs, and they own the media.
Does he hang out a lot with zuckerberg, he talks in a very similar way, that stutter like pausing and air gasping, wth?
Of course he does. Since before Cambridge Analytica.
Wait having a mountain of money does not make you invincible?
He knows they’ve crossed a line into the most indefensible of behavior. He knows that they’re killing us for profit, and he’s begging us to stop defending ourselves.
The mask is off. They’re now openly asking us to die for their wealth.
They’re now openly asking us to die for their wealth.
He's a dragon hiding in his cave guarding his hoard.
When dragons are about, there's only one thing you can do: slay them.
It’s really telling that their fear is causing them to spend so much on security and separating themselves from the masses rather than, I don’t know, acknowledging the grievances of the masses and spending a paltry percentage of their wealth to solve some widely recognized societal issues that government can’t or won’t address.
Seriously, the cognitive dissonance on display is mind boggling when so much of the population sees you and your kind as greedy leeches, and your response is, “They’re simply wrong!” as you pump obscene amounts of money towards your security, bunkers, and electing politicians who will protect your widely despised position in the world.
Even the actual honest to god mobsters were smarter than this, with their soup kitchens and whatnot.
As it should have been since the beginning
bunkers gotta have exhaust vents. those are super visible with IR.
And easily defeated with dirt.
Yep. They really will be coming for our guns.
Who’s “they”?
Lol, fair. That’s the problem, I don’t know. I and colleagues love to play the prediction game but I don’t know. Declaring Luigi a terrorist doesn't feel like something that organically came from our government, at least not inside the context of the prior years and all the shooters therein.
There are problems in our government, big problems, many of which directly grew from the 1981-2020 American experiment of removing subsidy from working class in favor of subsidizing corporate. That is why there’s a disappeared middle class, among other things, and corporate has grown so large.
The 1950s affluence is what subsidizing the middle class looked like, granted, with a heavy lean on white. That was American federal policy FDR-1981.
What does subsidizing the middle class and extending it to both women and POC look like? We don’t know, we haven’t done that experiment yet. What we have now is an odd mix of pushing rules for legal under the law for everyone but with no working class subsidy. But I’ve already digressed too far.
Today, since November, we have open, blatant corporate win. The king of corporate, the man with the most wealth, is now having an entire government body being created for him to cut what he likes, and he’s proven through action that he doesn’t like the American worker.
Trump doesn’t like guns. He played to his base, but he’s on record as disliking guns very much, well before that kid from his base tried to shoot him. Enter the CEO/corporate cloud of people he’s surrounded with right now combined with the public reaction to Luigi. Suddenly, Luigi is declared a terrorist.
My prior belief was an act intended to influence or upset our governing body was required for the terrorist label. I don’t know how a for private health care insurance company qualifies as a government body, but here we are. With CEOs running scared I think we know why this is now a terrorist act.
This is new. Authoritarian government, open corporate/CEO running of our government, and Luigi. The line has blurred and we’re seeing a blatant showing of who is in charge of us now.
As such. I don’t know who is coming for our guns since this government transition isn’t fully complete yet. But the possibility does feel real now within the context of current events, the slow trod on the backs of working class for 40yrs, and that first domino from Mr Luigi.
Prior, that statement was an eyeroll and laugh as ridiculous. Now, I don’t think so.
But hey, I’m just one person sitting in an armchair playing prediction games. What do you think?
I don’t mean to oversimplify, but it’s late and I’m tired. People seem to love their guns more than their children across a large swath of this country, so I guess we find out when we find out.
My first thought is that a safe full of guns won’t protect you from a hellfire missile coming through the front door. My second thought is that rural America will collectively lose their shit if Trump comes for their guns to soften up the populace for whatever follows. Then again he also might deputize a bunch of jackboots, which almost seems guaranteed at this point.
Who’s to say what happens next.
There's more guns than people in America. This is what people don't understand when they say "you can't stop a drone with an AR" yeah, sure. But there's only a handful of drones/drone operators in America. 250 million people with 350 million guns are going to win in the end. Full stop.
Edit: there's not enough cops/agency people in the country to take guns forcefully in America. With the coming cuts to government agencies, there will be even less, both in enforcement and in discovery.
no they won't. it's too integral to the system of white supremacy holding the system up in the first place
I don't understand, are they paying you to run interference? America is having a moment of class consciousness and you're still hammering the racial identity politics? It's the supremacy of capital, we'd all do well to remember that.
Hitler particles detected.
Well, that's a very unusual thing to say.
You're right, you're doing economism, which isn't exactly the same as being a patsoc but you have to be one to be the other...
We were talking about guns and the 2nd amendment, which was about slavery and expansion into the west. Guns and their culture are a big part of many of the institutions that uphold capitalism. You had a violently negative reaction to it, accusing me of being a mercenary secret agent or something. "Racial identity politics." Racial identity politics are how capitalism started.
That isn't my reading of Marx, what are you basing that on? That's certainly not the process described in Capital.
Come and get them. I dare you.
view more: next ›