we are forever climbing

  • 4 Posts
  • 125 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
cake
Cake day: April 11th, 2024

help-circle


  • I really don’t understand what either of you are talking about tbqh. Since Clinton’s presidency upwards of 50% of Americans are in service work, very few people are in these industries where people actually take propaganda seriously (ritzy tech workers are). But it’s like advertising, you know it’s bullshit, but it hints how people will view you for buying a product, and that’s pretty unavoidable.

    For 90% of us propaganda works primarily by 70% omission, rest is some depressing watered down truth to direct our attention towards, and indecipherable screeds which as we read them we can tell are not for us, or sometimes even talking down to us with bloodcurdling austerity bullshit. With our eye for media criticism we can translate them: “i am a failson and i was handed this job” “i want to bomb iran so bad it hurts” “fuck you die die die get sick fuck your kids, i think your bodies will sponge the virus for me, only my kids get air filters muahahaha” etc.

    There is of course a reason people are coming to the US to be exploited for higher wages than they can get at home, but US workers are still headed into a position where they have no way to survive in this shrinking empire. Many people are losing their homes and dying.

    We don’t need to try to reason with people who really take the NYT really seriously or have a bunch of reddit karma, that’s a small fraction of the population. It’s good to relate this to dependency theory but not if we leave out inequality and where all the wealth and debt is in the US.



  • It’s more being highlighted as part of my response to some unusual criticisms of the analysis of how financialization has destituted so many people in the US. Saying that it’s somehow trying to paint industrialist exploitation of workers as being okay, but financial exploitation of workers as bad. That’s not what highlighting the contradictions between finance and industrial capitalism is about. It’s examining the further exploitation of workers more in depth than just looking at the low cost goods taken from poor countries like tropical fruits, and higher wages overall. (Alongside looking at how financialization is disintegrating the economy and deindustrializing the first world BECAUSE of the exploitation of the third world, it’s not some Infrared shit about how baristas are the labor aristocracy and only industrial shit matters. People think everything is Patsocs. There’s only like 400 patsocs. Most of the likes “patsoc” posts get are coming from African uncles who know what Hillary Clinton Emails Revealed) I’m saying only 10% of the population even belongs to the global labor aristocracy but I’m open to hearing arguments against it. Maybe my definition of labor aristocracy is too narrow.



  • The pineapples thing is a reference to undercosted exports from global south countries which are a good example of a way that workers in the imperial core benefit. I’m using this example since it points to rising food costs, which show where the exploited wealth actually goes. You can also contrast the cost reductions of imperialism (which are being yanked back pretty severely) with the financialization of the lives of workers on top of increasing hardships.

    Nobody in their right mind would care if pineapples were $11 if they got paid more, or had at least a thousand more dollars a month from socialized housing and medicine rather than this bloodsucking insanity, nobody wants food picked by wage slaves who get treated like shit, as evidenced by where most people spend their money at the grocery store when they have more of it (healthier and more ethical choices).

    I am also deliberately using different terms for high/low income countries interchangeably.


  • It means they want to use telemetry to understand which features are used, to change how they deploy features. Since it’s related to investment I wouldn’t be surprised if it means more intrusive stuff like Pocket rather than their subtly irritating changes to bookmarks being worked out better.

    I don’t need feature developement streamlining based on user surveillance. I need options to disable features which are built based on a serious user feedback system if I don’t need them.

    Best thing about Floorp is how it lets you swap between layouts of the browser itself to me






  • I think it’s pretty easy to identify who falls into the category of not being worth dealing with. Ppl employed at like raytheon, in cybersecurity, building submarines etc, lotta people working at boeing are gonna be intractable as hell. See how during the recent debacle w Boeing that Prospect article just focuses on improving industrial productivity (& workers avoiding going to jail for literal felonies tbf and having benefits stripped), fighting off financialization to bring back GLORIOUS USA EAGLE BURGER PLANES. Not everyone who has a retirement plan but most of the people who have retirement plans and mortgages. That’s crucial for understanding why they have these imaginary class interests of being fake investors and fake real estate moguls. Makes talking to people so aggravating that you’re better off with the rest of the 90% of the population.

    When we’re online it’s important to weigh how people we’re interacting with are more likely to be people who can make money in their sleep, (or are children lol).



  • I think my problem is it’s impossible for me to treat any communications channel as a “space”. Sometimes I deliberately zone into a Mastodon instance to post huge angry open letters at the admin because it just doesn’t bother me.

    I recommend reading fiction it gives a lot of perspective on life even if you’re just kind of analyzing how it was written. I got stuck reading nonfiction for too long 2021-2023

    Fiction allows me to kind of absorb other people’s experiences in a cryptic way. Maybe I’m out of my fucking mind or maybe I’m over-explaining a basic concept familiar to everyone who did better in school ☺️





  • It’s surprising certain people are so hostile to the discussion of financialization in the core countries and assume this is some kind of Proudhonist simping for industrialists. (Was Mao simping for the national bourgeoisie when he conscripted them to the anti-imperialist struggle? Just a short detour.) This is not about the exploitation of industrialists, nobody is crying for them, this is about the competition between industrialists and the FIRE sector to exploit labor. It presents an opportunity in third world countries because contradictions are starker following covid 19 and the sanctions on Russia. I hope Biden sanctions Iran. Do it you old bastard. I dare you

    It really resolves the whole question of why Americans can be some of the richest people in the world, make the highest wages, and give it all up to the system and die, when you see stuff like JP Morgan Chase making 80% of its income from mortgages. This site is one of the best places to find discussion of this despite the occasional outbursts of idealism. Don’t we all joke about where the money of the top 10% Americans gets wasted? Gotta finance another SUV! We need real analysis not tweets and literary references. Yes, small proprietors are evil, they grab people’s asses, they talk shit for no reason, but it is a fact that they are screwed by financialization, by suppliers raising prices in “anticipation of rising costs”. It seems like some people are looking for reasons to avoid any coalition with anyone rather than actually looking at the contradictions.

    For most people, imo they’re inundated with fear, not the American Dream. I think their uncertain precarity makes some dude who only knows how to post screenshots of Engels and imply they’re relevant talking down to them about how they believe in propaganda because it makes them feel better about being a pampered westoid v unlikely to produce any success.

    It’s completely misunderstanding US inequality to assume these things. People are in fact pissed and not living the dream. Look around.