Allonzee

I'm on your side, and believe society should assist its people from those most in need. I'm a democratic socialist, and would be open to communism if automated resource gathering like robotic agriculture became sufficiently of age.

That said, the Nordic models are the easiest sell to eventually get there, as there is hard data that they are the happiest societies on Earth reliably by a mile.

If you can't sell the the idea that the point of a society is to maximize the wellbeing of its citizens, and the Nordic countries objectively do it best of all existing models going by the data, then there is just no reasoning our way out of our own self-imposed extinction.

There really isn't a more powerful argument I've encountered with concrete data to get others to realize that "the free market" isn't their friend and regulation and taxation is if you're a regular member of a society that doesn't have aspirations of global economic conquest.

You want to be happy? You want your neighbors to also be happy? You want your kids to be happy? You don't like living around tons of miserable homeless people and want them to be happy and housed rather than dying in front of your apartment complex? Nordic model let's fucking go.

In the near term, people increasingly not being able to afford basic necessities like housing and food will lead to increased societal violence, but that likely won't cause collapse.

Climate scientists are increasingly warning of ecological collapse, meaning core climate systems will fail, like the Atlantic Gulfstream which will cause global famine and destruction, and that might be the end of human civilization all together, we won't know until we do it within the next half century, and see the full extent of our fine work, a climate hostile to agriculture, dependable fresh water, possibly even standing structures not made of steel and concrete.

But man are we speeding towards that cliff for short-term private shareholder profit, wheeeee!

Some North Koreans see Kim Jong Un as a literal deity, because that is what they are indoctrinated to "know."

Some people have smart parents that help them, some people are naturally gifted, some people see the horror capitalism inflicts from an early age at a personal level that overrides the programming, but our nation is captured by the capital market, as its education system.

They probably aren't fixable, but our millions upon millions of willfully ignorant capitalism worshippers voting and advocating directly against their own interests were made, not born that way. They are the default, the ideal laborer, from the owner's perspective, the kind that accepted their lies as self-evident, including hatred for anyone but devout capitalist market worshippers.

Your rank and file Republican voter was just a kid of average intelligence or below, fashioned into a soldier for big capital to maintain the exploitation they themselves are also subject to in perpetuity.

But if that isn't enough, the most important reason to pity the poor ignoramuses is this:

The owners WANT those intelligent and equipped enough with critical thinking and reasoning to hate and fight the caste of ignoramuses they've made. That is a feature not a bug, because so long as the ones that can see this crony capitalist system for what it is hate the ignorant masses that defend it against their own interests, and vice versa, we'll never have the ability to rise up against them. It's yet another layer of control.

By hating the victims of capitalist indoctrination, rather than understanding they are victims too and a painful symptom of the disease that lives in capital markets, you're doing exactly what the owners want. Those with hundreds of millions in exploited capital are our actual enemy, debating/fighting the legions of their lobotomized victims/useful idiots is a sideshow.

Those people are a blight, don't get me wrong, but if there is a solution at all, it's bypassing them and fighting the tiny class of people that created them, easily identifiable by the way, as they love to be on Forbes lists that show off their ego scores.

Almost always, if you want to know who the real problem/perpetrators are, you need only identify who's holding the big bag of loot thanks to the situation. Ho dunk Cletus in the trailer park may have voted for Trump twice, but he is not a beneficiary, just a cultist who isn't bright enough to understand he's a cultist.

Not their fault. Don't hate the non-wealthy ones, pity them.

They're deluded to be that way by the owner's for profit media propaganda and captured public education teaching us all that reveling in ~~greed~~ "rational self-interest" and being a rugged individual instead of a member of a society is the only way to live. You have to think critically (something most aren't taught until college by design) and actively buck that programming to actually see the reality for what it is.

There used to be something called the social contract, but that was set on fire so long ago with the false delusion lie impressed onto us by the owners of one day becoming the millionaires inflicting ourselves on society, many don't even know the term.

Technically even the nordic nations have capitalism, they just have it straightjacketed/heavily regulated to benefit society. High taxes no one resents because they are educated to understand that everyone benefits from a society where everyone is educated to their potential and taken care of.

Allowing capital into governance as we did and do will always lead to the crony market capitalist economy capturing, straightjacketing, and exploiting society for private profit.

Campaigns should have always had public funding, with attempting to bribe, oh I'm sorry, "donate to" elected officials being treated with the same severity as first degree murder considering you want to change society to benefit only yourself.

But that ship has sailed.

No. Of course not!

Failing to Reject the Reagan Revolution, and mass embrace of the Jack Welsh style "trickle down" economics lie, by BOTH parties was the point of no return, almost half a century ago at this point. This car was already totaled.

Citizens United years later was just a victory lap by the owners pissing on the long dead corpse of the dream of societal equity.

Trump is just another symptom of that intransigent reality we all live in.

I'd say hope for collapse, as painful as it is, to have any hope for a better life for our children, maybe, but oligarch greed made climate change and at this point inevitable ecological collapse in the coming decades means there really isn't hope for a better society/civilization for generations(if they eventually develop technologies to better cope with the new hellish climate reality) if at all.

It's ruined for their children and theirs, but you don't become a 9 figure millionaire or billionaire by loving anyone else like your children, only yourself.

The 28 thousand 100-million-plus inaires on earth we all serve one way or another have no national allegiance, and will simply vacation from whatever temperate climate is left that accepts currency to the next until complete ecological collapse from their own fine work in 20-40 years.

Then yeah, they'll retreat to their luxury bunker complexes and sip expensive whiskey under the world they destroyed, probably nonsensically blaming the poors they mercilessly exploited for ruining the planet as they'll never self-reflect on their own avarice and sociopathy.

As I said, modern pharoahs, so of course they have decadent tombs at the ready.

If it makes you feel better, everything was already ruined.

The best case scenario was continued crony capitalist dystopic hellscape with the poor's lives being burned up in subservient subsistence to our modern pharoah oligarch class... but you know with identity affirming ribbons and pins and stuff.

Now we get all the oligarch stuff with... concentration camps and death squads and stuff.

Either way, the owners win, they don't care. Their mistresses will always have abortion on tap, their nepo children will always have their identities affirmed, elections are simply for the poors to either inflict supplimental cruelty on other poors or not to give us the illusion of choice and keep us hating one another instead of looking up at our owners.

This country was ruined irreparably in the 1980s, a few Tuesdays ago was just a reminder of that reality.

That song is in my toddler's music rotation.

Humans didn't evolve until about 300,000 years ago. Humans didn't exist 900,000 years ago.

If we did, it would make us even dumber, since we already spent about 280k years in the dirt before we considered growing food ourselves in one place.

Congratulations, you bucked the overwhelming norm. People who make it to Congress, with the exception of spoilers, have proven to their respective parties through state elections that they love money, don't get bored of getting moar money, and know how to get it. That's how you get promoted in the parties. It's all they care about.

Because our values are so far beyond fucked it's almost funny in an absurdist humor kind of way.