fishtacos

I've reconsidered my use of the term brainwashing. I think this explanation is a good one:

https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

But yeah the bootlickers sure feels like they are brainwashed.

Sorry for another wall, there is a lot to discuss here.

let me start by saying that based on your response I actually think we have more in common than we don't. We both believe that there are problems and society, but we may disagree on what causes them or how to fix them. Honestly this is better than what I was expecting, which is why I came out strong. I see a lot of people think that big corporations do nothing wrong and everybody is just being crybabies.

Furthermore, to defend why I believe capitalism is the source of these problems, requires talking about many nuanced topics that are all into related in complex systems. However, I don't think my ideas are unique, and I don't think they are hard to self-research. I'll provide quick overviews as best as I can.

For example:

So a company is not fulfilling its obligations systematically, does not get sued sufficiently bad to stop, and you are blaming capitalism, not the judicial system, not lawmakers?

Ah, you bring up a great point. Why would we not blame lawmakers and the judicial system? Awesome, this really is a good point, let me explain.

Who makes the rules? Who decides the law? I'm not going to pretend to know all of the details. But it certainly isn't you, or me. For now I'm going to chock it up to "politicians", which in this case includes "lawmakers". I know it's more complicated than that, but this is a short post, not a ProPublica article.

Have you ever tried to sue a company for doing something wrong? First of all you are probably in a binding arbitration agreement if you are an employee. Even many of the services that you currently use, you have also implicitly agreed to a binding arbitration agreement. The law is stacked against you, we cannot sue these people with such a stacked deck against us.

The reason for this? Because those lawmakers allowed this to happen, because they are politicians are paid off by the corporations in the first place. Those corporations (as a "person" entity), and individuals, including but not limited to the billionaires, donate to big funds and super packs which get these politicians on the ballot and in front of the public in the first place.

Therefore, the people who are on the ballot, those that have commercials and other advertisements, have been backed by those companies willing to pay for those things. Therefore, those politicians, no matter who gets voted in, will support their real backers by backing laws that defend corporations, instead of defending you. And when corporations do break the law, they rarely get more than a slap on the wrist.

So what enables corporations and their very wealthy individuals to support this? Their massive profits. Capitalism incentivizes' lots of profits and a high profit margin. Those profits go to the owners of the business, either in dividends or in stocks or in salary or bonuses. Either way, they get that money, not you. When the most successful companies are making the most profits, they are the ones that have the most power to buy off the politicians.

Therefore, capitalism is the source of dirty politicians, which is the source of dirty lawmakers, and a bad judicial system.

This is asking the five "whys" of why the system has a problem. If you only ask only one why question, you will say that these companies are corrupt because their leaders are corrupt. If you ask two why questions, you might find that the judicial system is broken or biased. But if you just keep asking the why question, if you keep following the money up the chain, you inevitably find the source of the problem is the profits generated by corporations. A system by which a few people make lots of profits off of the backs of many people, is called capitalism.

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Okay some other minor points

So paying for union membership is fine, but paying for company membership, where you can make money, is not?

I didn't say that..., I think union dues are a compromise. Unions help laborers, therefore sending money on union dues is "worth it". More profits for a company just feed the rich. Union representatives aren't rich. This is a different situation.

Also I'm very familiar with worker coops. They are also a compromise. If a company can make it work, great, but capitalism doesn't reward an awesome self-starter group working together to make their jobs better, it rewards profits for the already rich. Therefore coops tends to perform 'worse', even if it's just because of the rigged system around them. Outside the US, they seem to work better, inside the US, there's a lot of difficulties with them.

It is very illegal, just like what Microsoft has been doing for half the 90s. And maybe 10 or 20 years from now, when Amazon is not that strong, it’s going to lose a suit without real repercussions, just like Microsoft.

Wage theft is illegal of course, I was referring to the "other" things (Paying less than you make for the company, paying less than a living wage, etc). I hope you didn't copy that out of context on purpose 😉

And plain power, which is not capitalist as well, it’s just a fact of life

Capitalism is one group exerting power over another. You can't live without a job, they have the jobs. This is power, money or no money. I also reject the notion that this is a fact of life. I think you should read about what socialism and communism really is, there are better ways.

You can’t just vote for making them weaker and expect that they’ll magically just do that.

Yup, you are correct and you're hitting a core ML idea. You can't vote people out, you can't ask them to take their own power away. If so, we would be able to fix this system slowly (or even quickly) over time. I don't see it going that way, therefore, revolution is what it will take.

Anyway, profits and competition and power and evil people exist, these are, again, facts of life. There’s no option to vote for ruling these out, and a vote can’t by itself make any radical change. So when you want something, consider how the balance of power would change, because that power won’t go away or be magically transferred to different people.

Similar to the same topic, but the idea of Socialism -> Communism is to remove the ability to gather power for the capitalist class. So long as laborers are in charge of the system, we can make change in the right direction. Start by getting rid of private enterprise, then accumulation of wealth is nearly impossible, then eventually you can provide, for free, the necessities of life, and eventually remove things like money, thus completely removing the majority of the possibility of holding power over someone else. There is no utopia, and socialists know this, but we can do better than what we have now, which is, in my opinion, just leaning into the power struggle and simply letting a few people hold authoritarian control over the population.

This means that more centralization means less checks on them, not the other way around. Many politicians promise this, but in reality the singular center never goes against power.

This depends highly on who is in charge. I don't know how to solve this problem, but I believe that, for example, if we remove private business (nuance here, coops and whatnot would exist, and without capitalism would work just fine), and we remove the ability to pay off politicians (Pretty much requires interrupting the system we have and starting over, IE: revolution), then we can have democracy based on real peoples opinion, and not the opinion of a handful of oligarchs. This isn't just a made up theoretical example, this exists in Cuba today.

Dude obviously you are out of your league. Yes all profits are theft, you worked to make $100 profit for the company, they paid you $10, $90 is taken, it's not hard. But even if you aren't ready to learn about Marxism....

Walmart: Please, PLEASE defend the billionaires that own Wallmart... #1 in stealing wages, yes, wage theft, actual theft. Please look it up. Even not considering Marxist ideas, just plain old theft of wages. Their employees have to live on government handouts, IE: You are paying more in taxes because Wallmart won't pay their employees a living wage... They're stealing from you... Like, this isn't hard.

Please use your brain. Bezos' company bans their sellers from selling lower somewhere else, forcing a monopoly on low prices for Amazon. Those companies and people make less money... Like.... C'mon, just because it isn't illegal doesn't mean it's not theft. Also wage theft, Amazon commits massive wage theft...

Google steals your data.

Apple bans companies from repairing their products.

Oil companies literally cause problems in the middle east in order to control gas prices...

CEOs are making TONS of money off of... stealing... war... propaganda...

All of this creates more profits, and takes more money from you or their employees. Literally takes no effort to look this up. You are being contrarian for no reason. Or you are deliberately creating propaganda, because even if you don't believe in Marxism, billionaires are still, easily, obviously, objectively, stealing...

Shit... Grow a conscious please... Prisons are supposed to be for rehabilitation, not slavery.

What an absolutely horrible mindset you must be in all the fucking time to think that someone deserves, at any point in time in their lifetime no matter what they've done, to be a fucking slave.

++1 TikTok is only political because Americans want to own everyone's data exclusively.

You noted that the ballot box is the best way to do this, but that we also have to eat the rich. The big problem is that the ballot box is controlled by the rich. Both sides of the I'll are paid off by corporate interests... And they don't care about climate change...

The ONLY solution is to EAT THE RICH... The ballot box will actually be taken care of when corporations can't pay off politicians anymore.

You're missing the forest for the trees. Why do people drink Coke products? Well once upon a time they were filled with cocaine! But now they're only filled with tons of sugar and caffeine, those are only the two most addictive legal substances besides tobacco and alcohol, which are simply more regulated than sugar and caffeine.

I'm not saying that people should not try to self-regulate drinking Coke. But I am saying that you will never, ever fix this problem by convincing individuals to drink less Coke. Especially since it's not just about Cola, it's about literally everything you do.

If you live in the suburbs, you absolutely have to use a car to get around. If you aren't rich you cannot afford and ev, and if you want a cheap ev you won't get much range or convenience (thought that is changing painfully slowly).

And you can't live downtown if you have kids, or if you can't afford the high rents or condo prices.... so if you don't have a lot of money, you then have to live in the poor run-down suburban neighborhood, which is a food desert. Now your only choices for food are Dollar general, Wallmart, or corner stores that have bars on the window because they are broken into so often.

Those people do not have a choice, they have to live in the world that they live in. In fact, we all do. Even having a choice to buy high quality products is a luxury.

The politicians on the ballot have all been given vast sums of money by organizations that sell you stuff. Politicians don't have to listen to you, they have other priorities.

Can you find a company that is not greenwashing? But is actually trying to make sustainable change?

And does that company eventually get bought by one of these larger corporations that don't give a shit?

Good luck voting with your wallet, you can spend a dozens and dozens of hours trying to find a clothing company that isn't using child slavery... only for their use of child slavery to just be covered up really well, and actually they are the same as everyone else...

Could you completely avoid buying Coke products? Sure. But then again, you can't control all of the restaurants that provide it by default, and it's such a cheap product that it doesn't require a lot of sales to be worth it.

Do you know what business idea doesn't work so well? Creating products that cost more but are no better than any other products, but at least you aren't using child slavery and environmentally destroying tactics! But then again, nobody can actually afford your product because most people are actually quite poor. Even if they wanted to, they couldn't by your stuff. So since your prices are going to be high anyway, you market to only rich people. But then again, most of those rich people don't have the time or energy or even care about how green your product is, therefore it's just bad business to spend more caring about how green your product is. Once you become a public company, nobody cares about anything except for your profits and stock price (usually based on your current or projected profits...). So... You ditch the green thing... There's no incentive to be green, at all.

Trust me I'm trying, and it takes those dozens of hours to figure out that there's even a problem like this, let along finding even 1 company or politician that isn't contributing to the problem...

But... Being more green requires buying and using less things, which is bad for the economy. Unfortunately we cannot just switch to green energy, we have to drive less, consume less, etc.

And who do you think is going to push back on that? How about the people who sell us stuff...

And how much money do you have to donate to politicians? Because it's probably not billions of dollars... but they have it, and they will use it.

I am not saying we should not try, but I am saying that we shouldn't ask, we should demand, that things change. But when politicians won't listen to you because of the fat stacks of cash stuffed in their ears... We will inevitably be closer to step 3, and if that happens, we'd better be organized and ready to build something better.

Sorry for the wall, I see a lot of misconceptions about this stuff...

I'm not convinced this is true for most people.

YOU may be conscious enough to understand not to buy a large vehicle because of emissions, bust MOST people do fall for marketing after a long enough period of time of being exposed. Think about ALL the F-150's you see (In my area they are everywhere) that have NOTHING in the back. NOTHING. Not towing ANYTHING. I have an EV hatchback & a wagon with a mid-sized trailer. I've done WAY more backyard projects than the vast majority of the people in suburbia. We've used excavators, built multiple 30 ft retaining walls, a 12x12 shed, and we plan on doing more. I will never need a truck because I can tow 2000 lbs in my wagon, which is more than 99.9% of people need.

Most "normal" people that I talk to, and that's all we have if we're not looking for people who are on the internet a lot, most of them think their truck is really convenient. They get a full sized cab that holds their whole family, they get that truck bed that they throw a toolbox and once in a while, and the truck can tow 10,000 lbs even though they literally don't even own a trailer hitch and don't know how it works.

Trucks are just the replacement SUVs, oversized cars that marketing has determined is the "american car". You can do anything in a truck! Or you can do the vast majority of things in a Toyota Corolla too, but those aren't "cool".

Marketing works dam well, Apple owns the high and computer market even though we know that they screw over customers by making their products impossible to repair (literally, there's software preventing it). Ford sells the most vehicles and america through the F-150, which I already established is something most people don't need but buy anyway. The vast majority of people do not even need a single family home. How many backyards go completely un-maintained? How many older couples live in a 4 bedroom house because... That's just what they are used too... We could have more middle housing for people who want space, but not a backyard, but they don't exist. You literally can't vote with your wallet to buy the housing you want if you don't want a single family home (Or a crazy expensive condo downtown, or to rent the rest of your life...)

And lastly, when your driving on the road in a little ev hatchback like me, you become painfully aware about how gigantic all of the trucks and suvs are around you. You realize that at any moment if somebody takes a wrong turn you are probably dead. Most people become very uncomfortable with that, and they get a bigger car, as big as they can afford, to prevent that feeling.

And we've just talked about cars and living situations, how do you vote with your wallet when every single product is made by child labor in a country being exploited by america? Can you trust when a company tells you that it doesn't do that? How much greenwashing exists?

No, car companies marketed big cars that are less efficient. They did this because using more gas is good for the "economy". It is good for business to spend a lot of money on big cars that take a lot of gas. There has absolutely been times in our history where our energy regulations were higher and our cars were more efficient and everyone was happy with it.

Think about it, why do marketing departments even exist if people are going to theoretically buy and demand what they want anyway? I'm too young to remember when commercials basically just explained what a product was and what it does. Nowadays, commercials are trying to get you to feel something, not explain something. Advertisement online are trying to be splashy and catch your attention, not be useful and tell you what you're going to get.

Any marketing department should be able to explain that they try to get people to by their products for reasons other than customer demand.