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It’s less about the number and more about how that wealth gets built and used.
I hope this art was made by a human instead of by paying a billionaire to generate it
It looks like Cuphead rip-off (which in turn was inspired by early 20th century cartoons, so who knows).
Reminder that moderates and conservatives can be “radicals of means” as well.
The tools of radicalism can be used for conservative ends, so gotta be careful what you wish for.
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Quick tip: the rag does NOT go into the mouth of the bottle. It goes wrapped or tied to a CLOSED bottle. If the bottle is open and the rag in the opening, you risk splashing the liquid on yourself and your friends when throwing
The Finns perfected this shit during the Winter War - skip the rag altogether. Put the lid on and tie stormproof matches to the outside.
I’m skeptical of this, I bet they had really good/particular matches, no? Some store-bought matches can suck ass.
You know that storm proof matches have a layer of oxidizer on the stick so that they can burn in any conditions, even under water, right? It’s not your regular matches
are store bought matches typically stormproof?
Not from the supermarket, but from the camping dept. Come in a waterproof cylinder to store them. Coghlins makes them, probably the easiest to find, Walmart or any outdoors store.
This guy molotovs!
Here’s an interesting article on why the guillotine may not be a very good symbol of resistance. The TL;DR is that it’s always been used as a tool of state violence, and that you can’t get rid of billionaires by just killing them all.
Guillotine is well reknowned globally as a symbol of antiauthoritarianism
One article wont change that
the idea is that the guillotine is for the current ones.
you can get rid of billionaires altogether by taxing 100% of every dollar above ten million, for example.
Problem with that is it just transfers the money to the government, which is an own-goal for the people - look how it’s being used now, that’s how it’ll be used with any added tax. Trusting the government is just as foolish as trusting corporations or billionaires - and that goes for any government, honest people don’t become politicians. Going about it by way of tax just transfers power to the political system even more.
For the people to have any power the government needs to have reduced power. The best way to address billionaires is to address the system that creates them - by constraining capitalism enough to prevent monopolies and concentration of executive power in any one person or small group.
All corporations over 1,000 employees should be required to be employee owned co-ops with executive compensation approved by 70% employee vote.
no, trusting the government is not as foolish as trusting billionaires. I won’t take this Reagan crap. the government is about a million times more useful than all billionaires have ever been combined. and it has to answer to the people. billionaires don’t. unless you start making them answer.
I take it you’re ok with $200bn to another pointless war in the Middle East? Countless billions wasted? Politicians answer to the people in theory, but not practice.
yes because that’s what i said. sorry to burst your bubble but they do answer to the people. this is literally what the people voted for. the fact that they didn’t think about it much doesn’t change this.
Cute, you still think that lobbyists don’t have the most control, along with other interest groups, which are all controlled by billionaires - who also shape public opinion of gullible people through the media.
Why was the big healthcare bill that was so “controversial” essentially a gift wrapped present to the health insurance companies? The only benefit of Obamacare for most people was the elimination of denials for pre-existing conditions. Lobbyists ensured that and billionaires even fought that via republicans. Both parties are bought and paid for by corporate America.
DNC panders to minorities and pretends to give a single shit about the poor (but nothing more than a pittance of concern) while lining their pockets with bribe money from corporations while RNC thinks we should be happy if we even have a job that pays us sustenance and should suck billionaires’ cocks for being so generous with us lesser than people by paying us $11.25/hr to do all the real work in their corporate slavery.
Government is the enemy. Corporations are the enemy. Billionaires are the enemy. The only ones that can be trusted are those close enough to you to have earned trust. The only real solution forward is to tear this shitty system down and begin anew without the billionaires or existing political class.
you’re literally talking about moneyed interests having too much control over the government. so yeah, billionaires and corporations are worse than the government in general. if you get rid of billionaires and shackle corporations, the DNC wouldn’t need to care about them over their constituents. same with the media. remove billionaires and chop up media conglomerates.
Have you considered that the people were only given two options, bad and worse? The bad option wasn’t working out for people, so they decided to try the worse one, and now we’re here.
There are countless examples of the government ignoring popular demand. Extensive polling shows that most Americans support a wealth tax. It’s not going to happen because almost every politician is paid for by billionaires. Have you heard of super PACs?
this is just more argument for billionaires being worse than the government. remove moneyed interests and you’ll have a functioning government beholden to the people.
Want to upvote and downvote this at the same time
I mean killing all the billionaires would technically get rid of them all, I think
Its not about the guillotine, its about sending a message.
Sure, theoretically, if you “guilloize” the first round of billionaires a second round will pop up, but if you “guilloize” that second round then each successive round that you “guilloize” will get smaller and smaller … that is my theory at least.
Fun fact, billionaires are full of candy!
Can we hang and beat them even if they aren’t?
Its the only way to know for sure they aren’t full of candy.
Billionaires are full of protein
Mmmmmmm prions!
Full of coins
Yes even that one
give them a “you won capitalism” certificate and then tax their wealth above 999 million by 100%
They would find a way to use that certificate as a commodity and resell it, lend it, borrow against it for extra gains haha
we need to abolish capitalism - capitalism inevitably leads to fascism
Basically, the issue with capitalism is that the more wealth you have, the easier it is for you to make more money. And since money can be used to buy goods, services and influence, there is always a way to use money to gain more political and social power. With that political and social power, you can push society and the legal system in the direction you want to go. So you can use your wealth to gain power, and then you can use your power to change laws and society so that you can make even more wealth and power. It’s a positive feedback loop.
Obviously, though, if the billionaires and ruling class are accumulating more and more of our society’s wealth, that inevitably means that there’s less for everyone else to go around - therefore, working class people feel poorer and poorer. Meanwhile, the economy is going absolutely great for rich people, so inflation continues to go up - everything gets more expensive, but wages don’t increase. The wealthy just keep more and more of the wealth for themselves. To accumulate more and more wealth, they change the laws so that they can avoid paying taxes, so public services collapse. Politicians are lobbied to ensure that public funds are diverted away from where it is most needed - housing, healthcare, transportation, infrastructure - and instead into industries where their class interests most benefit from it, such as weapons manufacturing and extractive industries such as fossil fuels and mining.
The working class are bound to notice that their lives are getting shittier and shittier, and if that situation is left unchecked, the working class would realize that the ruling class are fucking them over, rise up, and overthrow their rulers. Obviously, the ruling class need to do something about this, but there’s no solution that the ruling class can offer. They’re causing all of the problems, to fix them they’d have to give up some of their wealth and power - and that’s not something they’re going to do. So they need to find someone else to blame the problems we have in society on. Unfortunately, though, no matter who they blame the problems on, and no matter what they do to “fix” it, the issue will continue to persist, because the material conditions underlying the issues are, very intentionally, never addressed.
So, the conundrum returns: The ruling class said that minority A caused all of the problems, minority A is persecuted and oppressed, but society doesn’t actually get any better. Either the problem wasn’t minority A, or minority A just hasn’t been oppressed enough yet. So the ruling class can either escalate the oppression, or they can shift the focus to another minority group. The division continues to escalate in terms of how vitriolic and extreme it is, and it also continues to divide the working class into smaller and smaller groups.
To get the working class to buy into this hateful message, they need to take advantage of our worst instincts, and one of those instincts is the in-group bias. The majority are manipulated into being suspicious, then intolerant, then hateful, then violent, then genocidal, towards whatever the targeted minority of the day is. Anything that can be used to divide the working class - sexuality, nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender identity, age, all of these will be used as wedges to keep the working class split apart and not working together, because they know that if the working class actually unite against them, they are completely and truly fucked.
That’s exactly how fascism manifests. It’s because it’s possible for people to accumulate power through wealth. This is why capitalism must be abolished. If we do not abolish capitalism, fascism will always return. It’s just a matter of time.
Until we get rid of money altogether nothing will change
Incredible write up, did you come up with that or is it a quote? I’d be quite interested in reading more if it’s available.
Thank you! I wrote it a while back and copy/pasted it from another comment of mine, and sadly I don’t have a corpus of writing to share with you, but I’m an anarchist, so I’d encourage you to check out an Anarchist FAQ to learn more about my world view.
Much appreciated! I’ll do some research on there.
The idealistic kill capitalism but I don’t have a replacement. So common, so boring, so never going to happen. The systems collapse ball is already rolling, survive and you can attempt whatever half thought through anarchist dream you have in mind. I swear this place goes full college freshmen some days.
Do you think we can build a successful alternative to capitalism without first building consensus that capitalism is not serving the needs of the working class?
Getting people to agree to torch government is easy. The new government is the hard part no has done well historically.
I definitely agree that it’s hard, but all the most worthwhile things are. It’s obvious that the status quo cannot continue as it is.
Don’t you think we need to actually work on building a better future rather than being too afraid of the dangers associated with change to start on that journey? We can learn from history to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
Stop pontificating and come up with specifics.
I’m primarily asking you questions, you’re the one who came in here calling me a college freshman, I’ll point out. Nevertheless, I can certainly share with you a comment I wrote a short time ago, which has some details about my world view, and how I believe that we can build a better world:
The only solution is a social revolution, which is what I advocate for. Of course, I don’t have all the answers, no one does, but I would propose building a worker-led movement similar to the Black Panthers - many people aren’t aware of this, but the Black Panthers actually provided a variety of what they called “survival services”, such as The Free Breakfast For Children program, clothing distribution, classes on politics and economics, free medical clinics, lessons on self-defense and first aid, transportation to upstate prisons for family members of inmates, an emergency-response ambulance program, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and testing for sickle-cell disease.
We also need to form a solid structure of industrial unions and workers co-operatives, so that we can provide goods and services to the working class without the need for the state’s currency or hierarchical structure. Once we have unionized enough industries, we will no longer need the state, and it can be allowed to atrophy and die. It is likely that the ruling class will not allow this to happen without a fight, so we will also need to defend our new society from them. I’d recommend reading an Anarchist FAQ for more information and joining the IWW, as well as getting involved in activist activities in your area.
Half a bil is way more than enough.
Honestly, 100 mil or even 50 mil is more than enough for any human to live a carefree life, without the need to work ever again and without any material want or need.
But we would be fine without a wealth cap too, if we got rid of the concept of inheritance. Make as much money as you can or want, but actually pull yourself up by your bootstraps and when you die it all gets returned to the people (and not your nepo babies).
Honestly, 100 mil or even 50 mil is more than enough for any human to live a carefree life, without the need to work ever again and without any material want or need.
I did the math; I’m in my early 40s and I’m pretty sure I could retire comfortably literally right now with around 2.5 million and just subsist on the interest and or investments on that for the rest of my life.
100 or 50 million would just be utterly excessive for any actual needs and the majority of possible wants.
Sadly, capitalism cannot be reformed - of course laws can be passed that would improve the situation, but because the wealthy can just accumulate more wealth, and thus power, they can change the laws again in the future to benefit themselves - thus they can repeal any reforms you impose on them. There is only one path to long-term success - complete abolition of capitalism.
Oh i don’t try to defend it or keep it alive, lol. With the changes needed to make capitalism work for everyone it would no longer be capitalism.
What would you replace it with? Your lofty ideal is a recipe for disaster for the working class until you have a fully-formed, tried and tested replacement system ready to drop in place. Until you’ve done that, you’re just foolishly damning millions of people to worse suffering.
That’s something we need to collectively work on - because we all have different needs and perspectives, no one person, no matter how educated, can just come up with the structure of a whole new society by themselves. We need to start by recognizing that our current system does not serve us, then we need to form consensus on how we can replace it.
I’d encourage you to read an Anarchist FAQ for more information:
the specifics of how to structure a non-hierarchical society must remain open for discussion and experimentation
If you haven’t developed a working replacement then you’re just fantasizing about “something better”.
Do you believe that a better world is impossible?
This could be a children’s cartoon. Guillermo & Molly. Give Guillermo a red moustache, though.
To symbolise Communism?
No, because the hole for the neck is where is nose would be on a human’s face. His mustache would be stained with blood. A reddish brown.
Damn… That’s more brutal!
Ty!
Blood, and/or Guillermo is a ginger… and bloody. Hell, give him a beard, too!
His “pants” could be the head basket.
Why is my first thought “i’d buy this as a shirt”…
Fuck me and my apparently still consoomer fried brain
You can paint it on a shirt yourself ;)
Too difficult. Better to ask someone who’s good at painting to do it for you. Then you can give them something, as a sign of respect, to compensate them for their time.
Paying artists a small fee for their work through a necessary middleman isn’t perpetuating the system in any meaningful way.
It’s the unneccesary trillion dollar middlemen that have bribed the regulators and positioned themselves as the only authority in a market that are doing the most harm.
Further, they’re getting subsidized by taxpayer money to do so.
TL;DR: buy beer from the back of a van, it does not matter
Every healthy society needs a robust guillotine maintenance and repair workforce.
I don’t know if you saw this posted earlier. Really demoralizing to see only 18% of Americans think being really rich* is immoral.
* Full response: “Being extremely rich (for example, having billions of dollars)."
4 out of 5 Americans are fine with billionaires. This country is so fucked.
I understand why you’d feel so much despair over that, but there’s some hope - the truth is that the majority of the population don’t really develop their own value systems to decide what is right and wrong, instead, they just follow the mainstream, which is often determined by the media and by their leaders.
To change the world, we don’t need to get a majority of the population on our side, we just need enough of a critical mass to be able to defeat the ruling class and create a new society.
These two remind me of Randy Milholland’s character Rippy the Razor
