AllonzeeLV

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.

Honestly I have more respect for the literalists than the ones that recognize the crazy, but pick and choose which beliefs within their religion they're willing to swallow the crazy of rather than walking away.

If you're going to choose to be a nutter, at least fucking commit.

I wonder how many US Presidents actually were believers and how many were just going through the motions because until recently in our history not identifying as one made you a pariah in the US, unwelcome in all the little clubs that could lead to the Presidency.

Obama seemed way too logical and analytical to actually buy into such irrational things. Trump clearly doesn't, purely out of narcissistic self-importance making himself his own deity/object of worship.

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.

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

You're incorrect. He said it in interviews constantly, and in one of his books (which he narrated the audio book for so he said it there too).

“Don't confuse me with those who cling to hope. I enjoy describing how things are, I have no interest in how they 'ought to be.' And I certainly have no interest in fixing them. I sincerely believe that if you think there's a solution, you're part of the problem. My motto: Fuck Hope!”

-George Carlin, excerpt from his book Brain Droppings

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.

"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!