I was careful to say perminant heirarchies for that reason. Bao Jingyan said that power originates in the contrast between the weak and the strong, and the cunning and the naive. I’m inclined to agree.

But we can have social institutions that break up and flush out these natural channels of inequality, rather than institutions that metastize them into heirarchies.

Aristotle discussed a then-current idea to redistribute all personal wealth above 5x the poorest citizen. We could tax all inheritance above say 500k at 100%. Eliminate all personal debt every 7 years.

There’s a lot we can do to make heirarchies more temporary.

There are lots of ways to organize people that aren’t heirarchical, or that dilute or limit power rather than concentrating it.

Directly voting for laws, appointing officials by sortition - like being picked for jury duty, pushing decisions down to neighbourhood councils, consensus decision making, a culture that always permits insulting the successful and plenty else has been suggested.

It all comes with drawbacks of it’s own, of course. And having grown up in a heirarchical society, it can be very hard to imagine anything else, until you read about all the times and places where people have organized themselves differently.

There’s a lot of neuroscience showing that social power suppresses empathy in the brain. Status, privilege, wealth, etc. make almost everyone less able to consider the pain of others.

Most of us can be reasonable with people we know. But the socially powerful are making most of the important higher-scale decisions, and they are neurologically the least capable of making good decisions on behalf of others.

Or that’s how i see the problem.

While i too yearn for the downfall of capitalism, pre-capitalist societies were still responsible for environmental distruction, slavery and genocide.

As long as individuals or a small elite have enough power to enforce their needs over the needs of everyone else, we’ll always have capital-b Badnesses.

We have to usher in the collapse of perminant heirarchies, whatever form they take.

Or the people who had to work, or couldn’t wait for 3h at their neighborhood polling place, or have disengaged from politics for any number of reasons, or were educated here and earnestly didnt know how important this last election was.

Low voter turnout is an inevitable symptom of a corrupt system.

Given how incredibly well the harris campaign was doing at first and the outpouring of bi-partisan support for shooting CEOs dead in the street immediately after the election, and the barnstorming success of mamdani, i think it’s safe the say harris lost because they took pelosi’s advice and tacked hard to the right, instead of solidifying their early victories by continuing to lean left.

I think it’s pretty clear the country was willing to vote for harris, dems just fucked it up.

everyone voted for a

~30% of the adult population voted for said rapist

The campaign came out of the gate punching and dominated the news cycle. Then they took pelosi’s advice and tacked right and immediately began to flounder.

Im not convinved the technofascists wouldve allowed a democrat win, but i don’t think it’s because kamala only had 3 months. Thats how long election campaigns are in civilised countries.

What kind of head leaves you thinking afterwards, “i would pay for that to have not happened. But i’d only pay $4”?

What kind of head leaves you thinking afterwards, “i would pay $4 for that to have not happened”?

That house looks sweet! Cool tree right there, plenty of nature, even a ramp. My appartment is less ada compliant than that.

Also this post is some middle class bullshit.

More empty rhetoric from a thoroughly establishment dem.

I wish we could shunt off all these warmed-up press releases from the newsom 28 campaign to an enough newsom spam community.

This is a really good question and ive not heard a good answer.

Even schumer’s stooges didn’t really seem to know why they were doing it. ‘It was the only deal’ or ‘it had gone on too long’ are both non-answers.

Always was.

That would be a good choice - schumer is the only dem who could make newsom look principled by comparison.

Wu Tang means “sugar free” in chinese so there are a lot of products labelled as wu tang.

Yeah that seems like it should be the case, right? This particular event does look like just an indie film fest that should’ve gone ahead to me.

But plenty of chinese dissidents are right wing lunatics. A lot are fundementalist christians or say, explicitly pro fascist meditation cults who fund trump and orban and claim to levitate, like the falun gong.

If you look at the damage the substantially far-right cuban expat community have done to politics in florida and pressuring towards bad policies and war nationally, id be more careful about which anti-china voices to empower.

I have often thought that if i got a bunch of money i’d make sure not to move house, quit my job or otherwise change my lifestyle. I’m also neurodivergent and quite devoted to avoiding ever excercising power and to ignoring authority as much as i can.

Realistically I suspect we’d get food delivered multiple times a day.

But of course i don’t think me-without-a-billion could ever really know what me-with-a-billion would do.

Not only do you have to be capable of immoral actions to amass that much wealth, but having power has all sorts of neurological effects.

People who gain power become less capable of empathy. If you gave a “good” person that much money, they would be less able to think about how their actions hurt others.

Yeah, i feel that. I think that in this attention economy it’s important to focus on the real.

I don’t fully understand why the fascists want us all focusing on BS, but we shouldn’t be giving them what they want.