The unproductive bitching is the point. Boomers try and fail to pin it on later generations, but they are the ultimate unearned victimhood generation.
Sigh
unzips
Its worse than that. A corporation starts a charity or gives 100k to one. Real nice right? Nope.
They will:
use that to decrease their tax burden, robbing the commons of their share of taxes to repair the infrastructure their semi-trucks and businesses disproportionately use and tear up, the public educated, pre-literate workforce they have access to, and then…
they ADVERTISE how noble they are, spending millions upon millions in ad buys to tell you what how awesome they are for donating that 100k. They use the guise of what is supposed to be giving with no expectation of return, ie “charity,” as a marketing strategy, and then…
They use such initiatives as lobbying tools to explain why their industry doesn’t need to be taxed to institutionally, societally address the issue that is currently subject to the transient whims of charity.
There is nothing a publically traded corporation does that isn’t done out of greed, that isn’t calculated to provide more return than dispursment. Nothing.
Charity with any expectation of return, beyond a warm fuzzy feeling inside, isn’t charity at all, but there is a word for it: a transaction.
That’s the thing though, the Republicans already broke that machine by refusing to consider Obama’s appointment, with no repurcussians of any kind.
At this point, obeying rules and norms and not doing what you can get away with in federal government to achieve your goals just makes you a sucker.
Meh, lets not.
In my experience, older people have to make conscious effort to maintain critical thinking and reasoning and not start lazily regurgitating settled, memorized opinions they’ve come rely on as absolutes, intead of allowing those beliefs to be subject to fresh challenges from novel perspectives that may change those opinions. Many do make that effort, and many do not. To paraphrase my favorite fictional character, if you refuse to change your mind, then you will die stupid.
Individuals are individuals of course though. I’m of the opinion that, on an individual basis, beyond the age of around 12, age is an extremely poor metric to estimate someone’s intellect, wisdom, and insight. I’m in my mid 30s and have a master’s degree in psychology with a 3.9 GPA. I recognize that there are 18 year olds that dwarf me intellectually, and more commonly 80 year olds who’ve lived lives devoid of reflection, who will die defending their long dead pappy’s narrative about how the world works with anger rather than reason, solely because that’s what they were told to believe. I have pity for that type, but very little patience.
They were. There was a DS9 episode where quark was sure he was goong to die and was pre-selling his body to collectors.
They were a critique of modern capitalists just as the Klingons were of the soviets. Unfortunately modern capitalism has become such a cartoon of insatiable greed, it’s become difficult to satirize.
It’s a numbers thing and it’s why empathy tends to diminish as population swells.
Here it feels like community, like one’s opinion is appreciated. Reddit became a place to hope you get acknowledged at all, where swaths of the community came solely waiting to shout others down and win a fight.
Unfortunately, for all of Reddit’s faults, that wasn’t a reddit thing, that was just a glaring, crippling defect inherent to humanity. As numbers increase here, that old familiar reddit apathy and antagonism will return. Just play the game of what would you be willing to do, not just rhetoric, for a random person in your circle of friends vs someone from your town/city vs the world. Psychologists call it psychic numbing.
Get your titanic billionaire dust speck with certificate of authenticity! Only $99.95!
It’s what any proud capitalist would want, to have their remains monetized and sold off piece by piece and circulated like the currency they dedicated their life to hoarding, just like the Ferengi do from star trek!
Right?! There’s innumerable dead adrenaline junkies maimed and killed all the time doing something that has a high mortality rate, by design!
Everyone’s just on pins and needles about this particular one because he’s among the global oppressor class.
But just like so many self-serving cultural views our oligarchs have pushed on us, a peasant with a death wish is crazy, a wealthy person with a death wish is eccentric.
peers inside
Oof, Billionaire dust, don’t breath this.
I will speak of the dead how they were, not how I wish they were, and especially not how they wish they were spoke of if has no correlation with how they conducted themselves in life.
It devalues people that lived empathetic, caring lives, it devalues the lives of people who struggled their entire life but never used that as an excuse to exploit or otherwise harm others to play pretend some greedy/malicious/antisocial garbage human was a “great guy.”
Don’t speak ill of the dead? It’s nonsensical. There is no God, but judgment still should come for a person, by the people whose lives they touched for better or worse, and it helps no one to pretend everyone who died was awesome.
Maybe if the world called a notorious POS a notorious POS when they died and tossed their corpse into a dumpster, it would, I don’t know, show the living that how they live will decide how and if they’re remembered.
I will switch if something better comes along that is decentralized.
The profit motive poisons everything and turns it to shit. I won’t join a social again if it can be purchased to turn me into another metric on a spreadsheet for someone to sell.
“Schools need to stop teaching my kids about how their crotches function! That’s the parent’s job!”
So when are you going to teach them?
“Fuck you! That would be uncomfortable so never! And if their ignorance gets them in trouble I will be there to condemn them for their mistakes and never let them forget it like any good parent!”
To me its tragic that the smartest human to exist in living memory had his societal, socialist worldview swept under the rug by the capitalist pigs. We acknowledge he laid the groundwork for our understanding of physical reality itself, but sure lets pretend he didn’t know what he was talking about with regard to improving our relatively simple by comparison exploitative inter-monkey social systems.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_Albert_Einstein
I mean, at least the first sentence is true, since we will have destroyed ourselves by then.
You don’t become a billionaire without being cool with exploiting people. Modern society rewards antisocial behavior.
We’re all going to be foolish from time to time in life, and I sure know I’d sincerely appreciate a kind hand when it’s my turn.
It depends on your net worth. I see Americans wish death on homeless people for lowering property values and insisting they did it to themselves. I see Americans telling student loan debtors who committed the crime of buying the lie and improving themselves being laughed at for their struggles.
Meanwhile a wealthy person can go to a fancy rehab for years of acting like a belligerent, intoxicated asshole, be called brave for it, and have their job with massive salary waiting for them after it all.
Second chances (and third, and fourth…) are for capital holders. Poor people half to walk a tightrope from birth and be both lucky and perfect to improve their station, with plenty of people ready to scold them for trying the moment they fall.
This belongs in the lemmy version of r/ihadastroke