this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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[–] [email protected] 158 points 10 months ago (9 children)

Hot take: corporatism and infotainment. You control money and information, you control the world.

[–] [email protected] 95 points 10 months ago
[–] Madison420 25 points 10 months ago (6 children)

Nope education is the downfall. Teach critical thinking well and you won't have such a malleable idiotic population that buys into either of those.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 10 months ago (3 children)

That's maybe a part, but not the whole story.

Your (and your parents', and your peers') real and perceived economic circumstances and opportunities have a lot to do with what you'll value and prioritize as an adult - how invested and loyal you'll be in society. Every poor person we generate due to greedy decisions has a very high likelihood of being a destructive force back to us.

Now consider how many poor people were generated by black slavery, segregation, and explicit racism in America, and how, in a society, we all just swim around in the same trauma soup, deflecting pain towards one another.

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[–] TrismegistusMx 18 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Education was destroyed by the same people who forced corporate news down our throats.

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[–] [email protected] 125 points 10 months ago (2 children)

The question "Where did we go wrong?" being asked on 4chan in /b/ is funny to me.

[–] BetaBlake 18 points 10 months ago

Cue John Travolta looking around gif

[–] Supervisor194 13 points 10 months ago

This was my feeling as well. Hey Anon, go look in the fuckin' mirror if you want to know where we went wrong.

[–] [email protected] 93 points 10 months ago (12 children)
[–] Potfarmer 62 points 10 months ago (5 children)

Next year will mark my 16th year voting for democrats, all they do is kick the can and move the line. While I don't think there is anything wrong with saying don't vote conservative, I do think it's a bit like saying "CLOSE YOUR WINDOWS" when a tornado is coming. We're screwed regardless of who we vote for, the only thing that changes is the rate at which we're screwed; that is why Anon is sick of life.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Democrats are also conservatives. If you allow the oligarchs and aristocrats to choose who represents you then they will always choose candidates who rule in their interest. You can't change this system by playing within the ruleset you're given. Democratic power can only ever be wielded by unions of workers and communes of citizens. Those organizations combine and concentrate the power of regular people and can effectively wield this against the ruling class.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (6 children)

The FPTP voting system means everyone is held hostage voting for the party they hate the least. If you vote for a third party you just make it more likely the party you hate most will win because the vote is split.

Obviously things still wouldn't be perfect with a proportional voting system but I think it would take some power away from capitalist oligarchs because we will be able to vote for a party we like without just making the fascists more likely to win. The issue is the only two parties you can realistically vote for are highly incentivised to not change the voting system because they will lose a lot of the power they have.

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[–] [email protected] 91 points 10 months ago

I wonder if it has anything to do with the system we've built to buy and sell products, owning, trading and hoarding capital? No, that can't be it...

[–] Mikey_donuts 67 points 10 months ago (2 children)
[–] Cabrio 28 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Too fatty. Better to use them for biofuel.

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[–] NounsAndWords 60 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Somewhere around 20 years ago/b/ was one of the first aggressively "us vs them" communities I was ever exposed to, and it only got worse from there.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago

You’re crazy, /b/ wasn’t around 20 years ago… I mean, it only recently started in the early ‘00s!

…oh no

[–] Cabrio 53 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (7 children)

Where did we go wrong? We stopped killing fascists. Appeasement never works when one party has no interest in concession.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago (4 children)

BINGO.

The reconstruction of the south shouldn't have ended until 1960, giving near a hundred years to set things right. Instead chickenshit halfhearts let the south return to political power and return to treating POC like slaves. Then they let their grandchildren build fucking monuments and statues to slavemongers.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 10 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 46 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (9 children)

so many people are getting to the point that they can identify that capitalism has caused human society to self-digest and go to shit, yet so many will give the most asinine dog-brained reasons as to why. It's reassuring to see people starting to wake up but frustrating to see them groggy, incoherent, and still half-asleep. 95 times out of a hundred they'll blame "corporatism" or welfare queens or race mixing or overpopulation or some shit and it's just exhausting

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Welcome to being poor .... I mean poor poor ... not the kind of poor where you can't afford a Lamborghini ... the kind of poor where you no longer have any luxuries like being able to go to the movies.

Where life is a constant hassle and struggle to survive. And where you constantly have to fight to stay above water. A kind of life where someone is constantly either trying to screw you, is screwing you or has screwed you. A kind of life where you no longer trust the people you see, the people you meet, or the people you live with. A kind of life where you know from the time you are born that everything and everyone will be hard.

I grew up like that and it became a normal part of life.

I learned to make a bit of money and survive and I've done good but not great ... good enough to travel the world. It gave me the insight that the majority of the world is poor ... I thought that before but after traveling, I realized just how true that really is.

The world we're complaining about now is the world that most of the world already knows.

Welcome to being poor and hopeless.

[–] NikkiDimes 15 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

I think this is less about being poor or struggling to survive, more about the struggle to find meaning in modern life.

I'm doing well in life. Could certainly be doing better (who couldn't), but my bills are paid, and there's food on my table. I don't worry about these things, and I don't struggle. But there have certainly been times when I've felt the sentiment of the OP. When your needs are met and you feel a sort of emptiness, trying to fill the boredom with the next best dopamine hit. I almost feel like I'm just floating through life, not yearning for, yet waiting for the day it all ends.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (7 children)

Everything is about money, not about having an actual human experience.

Human experience is still there, everywhere. You have to make the effort to get out of your burrow and do things outside with physical people.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 10 months ago (2 children)

It's hard to make an effort when all your energy goes into survival. Wasn't the point of "civilization" to not have to worry about all of that?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (7 children)

Human experience has been almost entirely privatized. If you're poor, you're denied most of it.

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[–] Sheeple 33 points 10 months ago

And then there's the idiots who try to use this reasoning to glorify a nonexistent nostalgia based version of "the good old times" when really capitalism is the problem

[–] [email protected] 30 points 10 months ago (11 children)

Of course, the big question with the line "I'm tired of being told to hate my fellow man" is whether they're referring to the constant fearmongering being pushed by conservative news and politicians against everyone who isn't in their in-group.

Or are they referring to non-conservatives calling out the bigotry being pushed by conservatives and doing that calling out is "pushing hatred on your fellow man" in this person's eyes?

Since a lot of 4chan is the latter while actively being a part of the former.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I've found that disconnecting helps. Leave your phone at home and go out. Chat with the guy you see every day at the grocery store. Go play chess or pétanque in the park with a friend. You don't have to do this too often, and you'll feel less like a product yourself.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Is this supposed to be a "the world has turned into shit" take, even though it's been like this for ages (way before the 4chan poster, or anyone alive for that matter, was born)?

[–] TurtleJoe 22 points 10 months ago (5 children)

Yeah, this is a common fascist recruitment tactic. "The world has gone to shit, things were better before."

This is the call to return to the golden past, a perfect time before "they" took it away from "us." In reality, as you point out, that golden past never existed. However, once people have it framed in their minds that their chance at utopia was "taken" from them, there's almost nothing they don't feel justified in doing to take it back.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I’ve gone through a lot of crap to learn and really believe that happiness and contentment can only come from within. The outside world has a lot to offer, but it will never give you that.

Unfortunately the outside world and circumstances CAN make it pretty damn difficult or impossible.

It’s a cliche to think of a monk or philosopher saying stuff like “if you want to be happy, be happy,” but that’s a lot of how I I’ve come to see it. And obviously it’s not that simple, we are pretty damn complicated, but that’s the spirit behind it.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It was leaving the trees that did it, really.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Nah we should have stayed in the water.

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[–] TrismegistusMx 19 points 10 months ago

It's been far too long since the sociopaths were put in their place. Now they have all the money in the world and can hire sycophants to be their personal armies.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago

My family wasn't rich and I didn't have many luxuries, but I still claim to have been much happier than many children who live in this hectic world where everything is so superficial. 90% of ordinary people don't even dare to have an opinion anymore if it's not exactly what the mainstream represents.

[–] Strangle 12 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Turn off the news, and stay away from anything online that lets you or other people comment.

Lose Twitter, Facebook, reddit (or reddit alternatives) and the world will look like a much different place.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 10 months ago (7 children)

Sticking your head in the sand will do that. Nothing will actually change but it’ll feel like it’s not there.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (16 children)

More like "don't stick your head in a pile oft shit", ignoring these platforms is not ignoring the world, it's changing your point oft view, you won't miss anything of importance.

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