Seleni

People who want money or resources. You have to remember though, these aren’t the brilliant businessmen they think they are.

Most of these rich people are rich through family and luck, and believe they have magical powers to resurrect businesses and economies with a snap of their fingers.

They think they’ll just put everything back together with them at the top. They really have no idea how they’ll do that, of course.

Same here. What a pile of bullshit.

And it’s easier to get to a polling place in the city than the country. This is just republicans not wanting to listen to their constituents again.

Wow, helping people instead of jailing them actually works? How shocking /s

In this case it’s just the rich punishing a plebeian for daring to challenge them, in the hopes of they make his punishment terrible enough everyone else will be too scared to rise up.

But in answer to you astute observation that the ‘pro-life’ people love the death penalty, the reason is simple: to these people, being ‘bad’ isn’t something you do, it’s something you are.

So to them it’s not a break in internal logic at all. They gave the pure, innocent baby a chance, but they turned out to be a Bad Person, so they must be punished, because that’s what you deserve for being a Bad Person.

This is why they favor punitive jailing and killing criminals instead of trying to reform criminals; criminals are Bad, and so they will always do Bad Things.

It’s also why they do stuff like try to get rid of abortion. If a woman got pregnant from ‘sleeping around’ then she’s a Bad Person and deserves to be punished by carrying the child to term.

Yeah, but 1929 was actually fine for the richest families. Plenty of wealthy people got even richer.

You’ll notice the language in that article describing the success of the businessmen is stock-market-bro speak for ‘gobbled up businesses for pennies on the dollar thanks to the depression, then rode out the storm and made bank’.

Lots of guys on the market these days dreaming of building empires that way.

Translation: hey rich customers, fire sale and reason to lay off your highest-paid employees incoming!

Remember, they and the people who listen to them wanted this.

Funny thing; when you basically force people to marry, they sometimes end up marrying someone they don’t love. Strange how that works.

It does for you. For the intended audience, it makes them cheer and jeer at the ‘stupid brown woman’ ‘finally getting her comeuppance’ for ‘daring to disrespect the flag by being an illegal’.

They have no sympathy or empathy. They want to see PoC crying in chains as they are led off by white officers. To them, that means the system is working.

It’s not that they’re not Japanese enough. It’s that they’re too Japanese for their own good.

What I mean by that is that Japan is a very conservative, stratified, traditional culture. If you are X, then you must Y. Always.

If you are a man, you must have a proper job, and if you are high-ranking you must have a wife as well to carry on the family name. If you are a woman, you must marry before 25, and become a homemaker, as having a job is ‘man’s work’ and caring for the house is ‘woman’s work’.

(The reverse, with the man staying home, or even more outlandish, the woman staying single and having a career, is just not done, as the English would say. The few who do so are treated much like oddities in a circus sideshow.)

If you are high-ranking, you must have this kind of job. You must have these interests (usually calligraphy for men and a properly traditional instrument for women). If you are lower rank, then you have this kind of job. And you are to always consider your family/clan and their interests above your own.

And so on and so forth.

They are a very old culture, and every action, every position, is steeped in centuries of tradition. It makes for a strong framework, which is both good and bad. The way they tend to see it, things have always been ‘this way’, and to have them be any other way is simply unthinkable. Many of them literally can’t get their heads around the idea that things might be better different.

And that creates enormous social pressure to conform. ‘The nail that stands tallest is the one pounded down.’ Often people are punished more for rocking the boat than for causing actual problems, hence things like the major issue with women being groped on public transport. Sure, the men are sexually harassing them. But the women inevitably are the ones that get in more trouble for speaking up.

And because of the pressure to conform, those who can’t—such as failing to get into the ‘proper school’—feel like they have transgressed so badly that there is no other option but to counter the shame they brought to their families by killing themselves.

Ones that are so endemic to Japanese culture and so central to their cultural identity that I doubt they will actually address them.

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

-G. K. Chesterton

A related quote that I also like:

Since it is so likely that children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise, you are making their destiny not brighter, but darker.

-C. S. Lewis

It’s been proven over and over again that if you give people at the bottom more money, they buy more things, which makes the economy stronger, which increases industry, which makes more money for the top 1%.

Yet, instead of upping pay for their workers, billionaires fight as hard as possible to do the opposite.

Freefall put it quite succinctly. It’s not about how much they have, it’s about how much other people don’t have. If they had a choice between having a giant pile of gold but everyone else has smaller piles, or having a giant pile of shit and everyone else having nothing, they would choose the pile of shit.

These people have been dreaming for years of a ‘new world order’, with them, the glorious techbros, leading their own kingdoms free of all that pesky ‘government influence’. Their plan is to wreck the world and build their little bunkers, and then all of us plebeians will be begging at their door to be let in, because the world outside will be unlivable.

They write manifestos about all this. It’s their wet dream.