Already the most disliked man in America, Zuckerberg will show with his next era whether he believes in anything as much as he does power. Was his interest in jiu-jitsu mixed martial arts authentic or a way to ingratiate himself with the manosphere’s podcast hosts? We may know by the time he faces his first inquest. Perhaps he’ll return to the liberal roots of his former public image like founding a pro-immigration nonprofit, as he did a decade ago.
They will throw money at democrats. It’s imperative for us to keep tabs on which ones accept their money. And AIPAC’s money.
Same thing they do every day, Pinky, try to take over the world!
My guess is that the extent of their token gestures will amount to little more than going back to pride flags in June and pronouns in their email signatures.
What will they do??
The only thing they can and should do is fuck off!
Fuck off and die, hopefully.
But, probably not.
They’ll help trump in some way to stop democrats from taking control.
They will cozy up to Democrats, and celebrate on stage with them when they take the Presidency.
In return for all of that “coziness” (i.e. donations), Democrats will continue their longstanding policy of not returning to pre-Reagan taxation for corporations and the wealthy (a 50-year tradition)
They’ll pretend they’re progressive again
I encourage you to read up on The Terror.
All of those tens of thousands of guillotine victims weren’t wealthy. Not even close. They were you and me. Only a tiny few were wealthy.
Recommend “Paris in the Terror” by Loomis.
Ohno, so we get a handful of billionaires and a boatload of Jan6ers, Christian Nationalist and White Supremacists… failing to see a downside.
Over 80% were commoners. People love to romanticise revolutions, but the reality has always been trading one wealthy ruling class for the next save perhaps Haiti.
I’m not down for murdering folks without due process. That being said, if one dispassionately measures the good done vs the harm caused, throwing every billionaire into the sea — even the “good ones” — the math suggests more good would be done then harm. Sometimes it’s difficult to reconcile the morality of not murdering them.
We need a shitload of Luigis to take the moral hit, leaving the rest of us to be innocently outraged. I, for one, would be the first to write a sternly worded online comment.
“If some good ones die, fuck it, the lord will sort em.”
-RTJ (RIP for being sell outs)
If Zuckerberg is so disliked, why do so many idiots still use Farcebook?
I cut back heavily on it for years and then deleted my account during covid when I noticed FB pushing toxic agendas. I told everyone in my life to quit as well. I am the only one who is off of it and my life is better and I never missed it to begin with.
deleted by creator
We can’t afford to forget about bot accounts. Social media and the internet in general is vastly polluted by non-human accounts trying to manipulate you directly and through your algorithm. Also it’s a literal addiction engine; yeah people on it are flawed and unaware fo themselves and harms they’re exposed to, and also the site is designed to exploit them to the tune of billions of dollars in psychological research. So don’t forget how evil it is when you want to blame the (human) users, it is in part victim blaming. Also, don’t forget Zuckerberg did this all with intent when you see his pasty robotic ass dragged in for depositions to explain himself.
Uhhh, cuz idiots?
If Trump is so disliked, why do so many people still drive on public roads and send mail via the USPS?
They’ll cozy up to the Dems. It’s not rocket science. All the corporations pay both parties to further their interests, due to the most idiotic ruling in history: citizens united, which effectively decided that legally in the US, money = speech.
Well make sure to remind everyone who Elon really is if he tries to pull that.
We’ll see what Vivian has to say about that…
It’s known as a plutocracy … a political system based on money and wealth
As compared to a democracy … a political system based on the will of the people.
America has always worked like the first and it’s debated as to whether or not it ever was the second.
Just in case anyone is curious as to what you mean, here’s a brief historical context.
Up until Trump and adjusting for inflation, George Washington was the wealthiest president in history with his net worth contributing an actual percentage of the US wealth at the time. I mean, we were still getting national loans to the tune of a few million dollars per deal and that was considered adequate at the time.
Jefferson used the White House as his personal palace while he was President and spent as much time throwing dinner parties and receiving guests in his dressing gown as being President and trying to undo everything Hamilton left behind out of pure spite.
It wasn’t until damn near Lincoln (1828) that your average man was able to vote, as only those who owned land were considered educated enough to have a say in government, and when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation we had the “who can vote” conversation all over again, and then once more and with feeling for the women after that.
“The arc of history moves towards progress”
We might take a couple steps backwards for every few steps we take forward, but no one can deny that we have moved forward.
We move forward with the hopes of the younger generation
We are held back by the fears and anxieties of the older generation
The movement is balanced by the lack of wealth and resources of the young, who have the energy and drive compared to the vast material riches of the old, who are shortsighted and can only see their near end.
deleted by creator
That’s insightful. But doesn’t it also seem to indicate that progress is inevitable?
In broad terms, the younger generation will outlast the older.
So it might be frustrating at times, even painstaking, but overall doesn’t that tip the scales toward reason to be optimistic?
I agree and it probably worked a lot better and faster generations ago when our elderly grew old faster and died off quicker. In our modern age, we have modern medical technology that can keep people alive longer and also healthier for longer parts of their lives … the problem is that much of that medical technology and knowledge is wrapped up with the only the wealthiest people. So those same dinosaurs I’m talking about get to spend way too much of their elderly lives in positions of power and basically holding everyone back for longer.
One of the biggest things every government around the world, especially in first world democratic developed nations is to institute a more strict retirement age for these positions. How can we expect a leader to lead a nation of new young people looking for hope to be led by a 70 or 80 year old who doesn’t want to think about the next ten years?
I’m in Canada and I have this debate often with my friends. One prime example is our federal governments Westminster system of government … where we have a house of parliament filled with elected officials from across the country, who can draw up, debate issues and pass laws … but then those laws are sent to a senate that provides ‘a sober second thought’ to everything … the senate is filled with unelected officials that are placed there by appointment.
Historically, the senate was just filled with friends and associates by the ruling government at the time … basically it meant that every democratic law in the country was first given over to unelected elites and business friendly people to water down anything that went through government … in recent decades, they’ve modernized the system and now it is still appointed people but appointed through a system disassociated with individual political parties or political leaders - apparently senators are appointed by committee
But its still filled with heavily influential people with money and monied interests … they keep arguing that any canadian citizen can be appointed but it never happens because you have to be a fairly wealthy individual, have influence and know lots of people before you could ever be considered for appointment … one of the prerequisites they point out is that individuals considered for appointment must own a minimum wealth of $4,000 (or something like that, I forget the actual figure but it was only a few thousand dollars), which most will argue is not a barrier to many in this day in age. What they don’t point out is that $4,000 in 1867 when the country was founded was equivalent to saying someone should own roughly almost a million dollars in wealth. It was always geared and built into the system to have wealthy overseers watch over the country and protect the wealth of the most powerful people.
Which makes you question, like I do with America, whether we ever did have a democratic system here in Canada
That’s interesting, I didn’t know that about the Canadian Senate.
Honestly though, and this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, the bicameral legislative system in general is a vestige of old social stratification from a bygone age.
The lower chamber (in the US that’s the House of Representatives, but in Canada I suppose it’s the House of Parliament) is basically a derivative of the House of Commons from England/UK. I think it was established by the Magna Carta (if I remember correctly) to give commoners (peasants) a say in government.
The upper chamber, being the Senate, in a similar way derives conceptually from the English House of Lords. In other words, from its inception, the Senate as a concept was always intended to be the house representing the nation’s aristocracy.
Things have changed over time of course, but there are still echos of its origins in the way it functions as the upper chamber, and also in the way people are selected as Senators versus as Representatives.
I’m not saying we should immediately abolish the bicameral system. There are certainly still good reasons to keep both chambers in place (and honestly we could potentially even eventually expand it to a tricameral or quadracameral system, adding a chamber that represents different career fields, or one that that represents different academic disciplines). But it’s just something to be aware of about the history of senates in general.
One thing I think every modern government should employ is a way or means to either change, upgrade or renew a nations constitution or overall governing laws. To change it or update it every 100 hundred years - or every 50 years or after every 10 elections or something. Basically to enshrine into law that the whole system has to be updated to modern standards every few generations to keep up with changing times … a constitution or set of laws that are allowed to change or evolve over time.
I know that the current system tries to employ change over time … but all those changes are based on the laws, system and regulations of a bygone era … systems like ‘senates’ in Canada … or the electoral college in the US
Existing or old laws and regulations were meant to deal with problems or issues from a hundred or even 200 years ago but usually those problems are no longer applicable centuries later … and those insitutionalized changes are only abused to manipulate the democratic system. Updating and upgrading the system every hundred years would serve to evolve the system over time and prevent forces from abusing existing regulations that no longer function.
I am sure that any new system that would be developed would have its own abuses but at least everyone would have an opportunity to do something about it all rather than just sit still and maintain the status quo, even if it means a degraded democratic system.
No matter the country … every nation should have a way to update its system to better represent people in its current age. How do we expect to represent the modern American or Canadian governments using regulations from 100 - 200 years ago when everyone lived with horse and buggy and didn’t have world wide mass communication? And in the future, how do we except future generations to deal with their problems 200 years from now using regulations from the 1900s?
Human society and civilization is in constant change and evolution and technology … we can’t expect our governing systems to stay static over generations while everything changes.
I have a suggestion for them: they can go fuck themselves.
Dems have a fuckton more house clearing to do before billionaires need to worry about a fucking thing, but at least it will go faster now because a lot more Dems will need to vote against in order to prevent passage, instead of the one-off “take one for the team” carousel of status-quo enablers.
they’ll just do pride month again
Maybe they might throw in some performative internal bullshit too like a DEI book club.
Hopefully the Democrats won’t chicken out and regulate the fuck out of them. Break Google, Meta, X, all of them up. Tax the fuck out of them.
They will agree, after much donation, that regulation is needed.
The regulation will protect current asset holders and IP rights, while limiting its utility to the individual and creating moats to competitors. They will do this by fear mongering buzz words like “national security” and “think of the children”.
Meanwhile the wealthy already have the hardware and open models to run whatever shady BS they want, while the consumer will get to rent the highly regulated corporate controlled versions that harvest your data and tell you what they want you to know.
They won’t do shit
You’re right, they won’t. They serve the same masters
