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the lizard thing is unfortunately just antisemitism, and older than zucc himself. the whole alien lizard people running the world bit comes from David Icke, who is very much a fascist, and was inspired directly by old school Nazi conspiracy theory texts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

i mean i get the impulse, but if we were to blindly trust any sort of knowledge system, science is the one to trust, right? like, any downsides of trusting scientific consensus are necessarily larger when trusting information sources that aren’t scientific, and if you follow through with trusting science blindly, you might ignorantly begin to believe that empirical testing and intellectual honesty is necessary for determining the truth of your beliefs!

we aren’t talking about millionaires? at least i’m not. this whole thread is about billionaires why would you think we were talking about random celebrities? like maybe this argument would be relevant somewhere else but i’m genuinely confused, we’re talking about Bezos and Musk here, not actors?

No, because wealth isn’t who you are, it is what you do. You own a business, you run a company, you are an investor, you are a politician. Every method of acquiring or keeping personal wealth beyond the physical things in your house, the physical possessions you bought with your money and the money itself, relies on your ability to own something that other people use. You inherit a company, you rent out property, you become an investor. All these things rely on you maintaining ownership over information, property, and systems. That isn’t a passive choice. That is supporting the enrichment and maintenance of systems which currently represent the largest danger to living things on this earth in the last few thousand years, ecocidal and homocidal systems of oppression which represent a grave threat to countless species on earth, and contribute to the death and illness of millions of human beings. Being as wealthy as a billionare represents the hoarding of such a massive quantity of resources that actual human beings are starving to death or living in desolate poverty in the modern era. The failure to put our vast resources towards alleviating human suffering, ending poverty, ending disease, ending hunger, ending war, ending climate change, are the direct result of a system like this, which concentrates so much wealth in the hands of so few. No. Wealth tells me a lot about who somebody is as a person. A wealth like Elon Mush or Jeff Bezos is the direct result of horrific exploitation, bigotry, and cruelty whose impact can be felt on the scale of nations. Billions are diverted into the pockets of individual men, instead of towards the common good. People starve as Jeff Bezos flies a dildo into space. People die of preventable illness while Elon Musk buys a piece of the internet millions of people use to talk to each other. And they own enough of the world that they can steer public policy.

Even if you don’t agree with me here, this is why people want Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to die, because they are the beneficiaries of a system which grants them massive undemocratic influence on the fate of billions of people. We all have to care about this fuckers, because the infrastructure they control shapes the course of our lives. Tell me, who would you trust with that amount of power? Why should any of us tolerate this kind of control over our lives? How are we served by systems which fail to prevent the deterioration of our biosphere, the health and safety of our loved ones, and the privacy of our lives? Maybe you don’t believe that men like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are this way, or you believe that there is no other way for the world to work, but others think differently. Who believe that wealth on the scale of a billionaire is itself a danger to our lives, that such power should belong to nobody. That if we are faced with the opportunity to save lives, make people happier, healthier, and safer, refusing to put our resources towards that goal is by itself an injustice. Naw, fuck Jeff Bezos. Fuck Elon Musk. The world would literally be better off without people like them.

haha. right, sure. wealth is an immutable characteristic. you have like, literally no understanding of history or politics, do you? i can understand not agreeing, but to make a statement like this you have to have fundamental misunderstandings about what ideas like “race”, “religion” and “ethnicity” even mean. thanks for that. really funny comment.

like, maybe that’s true, but i’m unsure if we have enough data to back that up as the main explanation for why people are hesitant to changing platforms, or if they are. maybe people have been brainwashed into staying on Facebook or whatever else, or maybe it was the first of its kind, and all its competition has been subsumed into it by monopolistic business practices, and people haven’t had any alternatives for a long time. maybe institutions and systems are very difficult to stop once they get going.

i dunno, i’m really just not convinced by arguments like this. its taken quite a bit of time for our understanding of social media and its impact to become evident, and movements like the fediverse are building up steam for a reason. its seems more likely to me that you and i are simply early to the party.

my position isn’t “we are forcing normal people to understand scary programming things”. that would imply i think that people can’t understand this stuff. its “we are engaged in communities where the structure and function of internet infrastructure is a topic of concern, and most people aren’t”. they aren’t being exposed to challenges to corporate infrastructure. they aren’t engaging with critiques of for-profit industry. but that is changing. people are more aware of the ills of social media platforms today than five years ago. hopefully, that trend will continue. i think that the only problem really is that more people don’t know there are other options.

you learn enough about the victims of capital, you start to hate the people who own it. killing them wouldn’t solve anything, but i’d still throw a party if they beefed it.

both these chucklefucks would kill you for a dollar. just sayin’.

it wouldn’t hurt tho.

i try to push back against this notion when i see it: misanthropy is not the proper response here. people aren’t sheep, they aren’t stupid, they just aren’t living in the same context as we are. for a lot of people (and a lot of older people especially), the politics of the internet are a black box, not because they’re too stupid to comprehend this stuff, but because its simply out of scope for what they want to achieve online. there’s tons of things to care about, and while the internet is a pretty important thing to care about in modern life in my opinion, lots of people simply don’t live enough of their lives online to give a shit.

i dunno, i just get kinda pissed off with the whole “sheeple” bullshit. not everybody has your priorities, and not everybody knows what you know. that doesn’t make them bad people, or stupid people, or subservient people, it just makes them people.

i mean, “dumb cake” isn’t a particularly useful comment about something. why can’t people try to read into things? nothing means nothing, somebody made a weird gender reveal cake where girls are frilly bows and boys are police officers. that says something about whoever wanted the cake.