Reminder: Ayn Rand died on public assistance.

They’re only for freedom to gouge for water at the only source for a hundred miles when they believe they’ll be the ones holding the ladle.

This is a good example of the “If you regulate/tax business, they’ll just leave and you’ll be sorry!” Ayn Rand fallacy.

All this means is that their business model was to gouge consumers, and being barred from gouging cheap internet for their poorest customers revealed that they were (and still are everywhere else) bad faith, dishonest, antisocial actors that have no interest in providing products and services for a reasonable margin.

Just as with any business that would exit a market, or billionaire that would leave the country to prevent taxation back into the commons that facilitated their wealth accumulation to begin with (a preliterate workforce, roads and utilities they disproportionately degrade with heavy use, etc) you demonstrate that you work against your own customers and your own people, so by all means, gtfo.

They still think it’s Presidential to follow pomp and circumstance to preserve the appearance of national normalcy as the nation burns on multiple fronts.

Just as in their Presidencies, they want to be known for promoting social quiet, despite their Presidencies all defending and furthering economic violence in the name of all their wealthy friends who “donated to” their respective parties over the years.

Biden was an og Congressional neoliberal. A prominent one. He helped Reagan convert Republican’s former opposition party into the corpo bribe taking, social inclusion!.. Economic die in the streets… party it is today, locking arms with Republicans to defend our murderous economy from us as they stoke social division between us so we don’t look up at our sociopath owners.

Voted for him out of harm reduction compared to Trump, a vote for quiet not peace, but fuck Joe Biden.

Our oligarchs want us to compete to the death for their ever dwindling relative to inflation and productivity scraps, but they’ve grown too powerful to tolerate competition themselves.

Not when they’ve gone to all the trouble of normalizing monopolies and duopolies at home.

Hurry up! We need moar economic metastasis!

This planet isn’t going to incinerate itself 🔥🔥🔥

To that I would say it’s just inhuman that we largely insist suffering people continue until the body they’re trapped in literally gives out. It’s a sad, pathetic, demeaning way to go, regardless of whether you can also afford groceries and meds.

I think any adult should be able to have a painless opt out option with a 30 day waiting period. We treat people’s lives as if they don’t own them to do with what they will. I don’t think it’s right to encourage or insist people who are breaking down to cling to their misery when there are painless options we refuse to implement.

It’s a bit of a bad joke really, we don’t care enough about one another to support one another materially tragically, but we also don’t want those people to offend the rules of our imaginary sky daddies. It’s perverse. We literally have more compassion for our pets living in pain.

Exit, which is still preferable to what we do with most elderly in the states. I used to deliver to nursing homes for 10 years all day every day, educating patients on medical devices. I have seen and been informed first hand by too many to count, death is better. The happiest people in them have lost too many faculties to hold a conversation.

You don’t want to live in even a “nice” home with any marbles still rolling around. The garbage to nice ratio is 10 to 1, and even most of the studious savers who didn’t actually live don’t get the nice ones with tapestries and French chefs, those are for the elder exploiters.

There are almost no happy people in those places, the best you see are some quivering brave faces that break 5 minutes into someone from the outside engaging with them. I came to think of them as living mausoleums as I went through their halls.

Has the sun tried threatening potential converts?

Works gangbusters for for the most popular religions.

Hell, they usually steal the sun’s defining characteristic to threaten followers with: 🔥🔥🔥.

American capitalists would tell you if you don’t spend your life eating cat food in a van to save for retirement on a peasant’s wage then you’re “irresponsible.”

You know, the whole "you had a latte?! You ate avacado toast?! Of course you deserve to burn in the fires of elder poverty!"blame their own victims thing, as they spend 6k on a bottle of wine.

Life past 60 seems has always been a very strange priority to sacrifice for to me, at least if you can only afford to either live today or subsist today and save for life past 60, which has basically become the choice for most here in the US as most wages don’t allow for both, and many for either.

Let’s assume you make it there having not gotten hit by a bus or killed by cancer or your healthcare insurance confidence scheme provider.

You’ve literally saved up so you could enjoy life when your senses are failing you, your mind is growing dull and confused, your own frail body is betraying you in new ways constantly, and your time is largely spent managing the ever growing list of symptoms building up to your impending death.

Sure there are exceptions, people who remain verile and sharp into their seventies, but they are not the rule. That’s like planning your life around a future lottery win.

Live for today, especially if you’re into your 30s or beyond. Better to have memories of living when you could in the shitty home with bad food then having memories of working and saving in the good home with the decent food your failing taste buds can’t really even appreciate anymore.

Oh gee I hope I get to live long enough to piss myself involuntarily again! Maybe I’ll finally take that cruise so I can soil myself in style and stay in my cabin because my body can’t regulate it’s own heat efficiently anymore!

Always appreciated, FS. It helps me to improve!

I know it’s not the popular choice, but Last Crusade is by far my favorite of the Franchise. I re-watch it way more than Raiders.

I’m not either. But I find peace in understanding, even if the answers suck, as this one does.

If I had an in anywhere in Europe, I’d leave and never look back.

I phone banked for Sanders twice, but have finally accepted this place would take generations of concerted effort to be anything less than cruel and inhuman. It’s too proud of the core causes of its rot (worshipped sociopathic “free to die in the streets market” economy, pride in individualism over community or society, social resentment of paying into Commons like public Ed, greed seen as virtue rather than character deficit and social ill, etc) to want to change.

Ask any therapist, if someone isn’t seeking change, you won’t get anywhere with them. We want things to get better, but we still want to dream of being millionaires and billionaires, and to remain addicted to harmful social opiates like social media, fast food, extreme consumerism, literal opiates, etc.

Voted for Harris out of usual attempted harm reduction because this place is irreparably destroyed since Reagan, but let’s not kid ourselves, Donald Trump represents the United States as it is perfectly.

Proudly ignorant, proudly greedy, proudly gluttonous, obese, egotistical, explicitly judges others on net worth, perpetually drunk on cruelty and schaudenfreude, obsessed with image and his own ego score, demands loyalty and servitude while providing none aka a devout capitalist, obsessed with economic metastasis at literally any human and societal cost, proudly racist while still insisting he’s not, the embodiment of what Americans disgustingly praise: a hyperindividualist who revels in blaming people not born to wealth for their suffering and insists this is a meritocracy after a lifetime of spending daddy’s money.

Donald Trump is like the zeitgeist of the modern United States somehow took tangible human form. You can try to argue we don’t deserve him, or that we have the potential to be a better society than one that would elect him, but you can’t argue he represents who and what a loathsome society we are. A monument of all our sins.

He’s more American as apple pie or baseball ever was, and he’s at least as American as our current national pastimes of mass shootings and of course disgusting hyper-consumption.

That’s why he illicits such a strong response in both directions. Whether you are repulsed or see your own necrotic heart in him, He is an accurate mirror of the practiced culture of The United States of America.

I hear what you’re saying, and yeah all communities have a narrative, I’ve been reprimanded on L/climate for the exact opposite, questioning where all the unearned optimism was coming from.

But the format is topics, and you do need to fit the topics, so I get it based on the community. That said, what I cannot stand is someone’s opinion being elevated on the basis of them being a celebrity, or an influencer. I prefer not to consume content through the prism of knowing of the person who said it. If Kim Kardashian has something she thinks is clever to say, let her say it without her name behind it to see if it sinks or swims on whether people read the comment and found it clever/relevant/worth propagating with an upvote or not.

I explained it to my friends about why I only used Reddit and now Lemmy:

I think social media attached directly to Ego is toxic and harmful. On more anonymous social media, ideas(content) at least tends to rise or fall on their own merits, rather than on the prior popularity of the individual saying them.

I’m here for cool ideas, concepts, and discussions, not popularity contests which most social media platforms are.

I voted for Harris in yet another attempt at harm reduction, not hope, but the Neoliberals and Republicans have just been playing good cop/bad cop since Reagan, intentionally stoking and magnifying social wedges to keep Americans divided and at each other’s throats while they serve the same masters on protecting the shape and fucked up priorities of our sociopath owned economy we don’t get a vote on from either major party.

Voting for Trump just makes our collapse sound like fart noises. We’ve been in freefall since the 1980s, our society strip mined for private profit. IMHO the United States under the current Constitution was irrevocably captured destroyed half a century ago. That’s when America died. The last 50 years or so has just been a combination of leftover momentum and denial.

In a dark way, it’s almost refreshing to someone like me to finally see everyone else waking up to the grim reality there’s literally no longer any way to squint hard enough to play pretend the country isn’t irreparably fucked. Better than all the willful self-delusion many enjoyed as education crumbled, healthcare became a murderous con-job, retirement became a decadent luxury for the few, etc.

We haven’t been a society for a long time. We’re an oligarch piggy bank/military platform. We wage war on the world, both through hard warfare and strong arm diplomacy, to open up new exploitation markets for our capitalists by trying to make other nations turn on their own people for private profit in exchange for a cut for their respective elites.

We are the primary vector of the world’s greed disease destroying societies, civilization, and even the very air we all breathe.