Evil Rich People

[japhy]

I accept your surrender.

[KUTradition]

…if capitalism really is so great at things like creating surpluses of food, then how come so many people still deal with hunger and food insecurity in a capitalist-dominated global market?

because humans are fallible and most people suck. how many tons (literally, tons) of food winds up in landfills annually?

it’s really no different than louis viton destroying their unsold goods rather than discounting them or donating them to the impoverished…gotta keep that bottom line

but that’s got less to do with capitalism than it does peoples’ greed

[ousdahl]

wasn't it Marx himself who came up with the economic-philosophical theory of materialism?

most of the other thinkers a the time thought that the person you end up becoming is more or less predetermined; that your personality and your actions and values and everything is already some intrinsic part of yourself.

Marx said the material conditions surrounding you can have an affect on who you are and what kind of person you become too. If you grow up impoverished, or in a war-torn area, that's gonna have an effect on you. And somehow, that was and is some controversial hot take.

Now apply it to the lefty thought that maybe, say, some black communities might be rougher communities, but they're rougher communities not simply cuz they're black like righties see it, but cuz they're communities that are impoverished and under-resourced and over-criminalized to begin with.

Or something.

actually reading Marx is way too boring for me, which is why I mostly stick to memes.

but it's quite a catch-22 that too many of the people of the world are too focused on basic survival to educate and organize in pursuit of some better system, but they can't educate and organize in pursuit of some better system cuz they're too busy just trying to survive.

again, perhaps that's even by design...

[ousdahl]

…if capitalism really is so great at things like creating surpluses of food, then how come so many people still deal with hunger and food insecurity in a capitalist-dominated global market?

because humans are fallible and most people suck. how many tons (literally, tons) of food winds up in landfills annually?

it’s really no different than louis viton destroying their unsold goods rather than discounting them or donating them to the impoverished…gotta keep that bottom line

but that’s got less to do with capitalism than it does peoples’ greed

but that's the thing!

How are you able to distinguish capitalism from peoples' greed when capitalism is basically a system that enables and rewards peoples' greed!

Not to mention the greed exhibited by the people who established capitalist systems in the first place...

[KUTradition]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture

[ousdahl]

I accept your surrender.

I encourage you to try to think of this all in terms better than the apparent battle between adversaries you perceive.

[KUTradition]

…if capitalism really is so great at things like creating surpluses of food, then how come so many people still deal with hunger and food insecurity in a capitalist-dominated global market?

because humans are fallible and most people suck. how many tons (literally, tons) of food winds up in landfills annually?

it’s really no different than louis viton destroying their unsold goods rather than discounting them or donating them to the impoverished…gotta keep that bottom line

but that’s got less to do with capitalism than it does peoples’ greed

but that's the thing!

How are you able to distinguish capitalism from peoples' greed when capitalism is basically a system that enables and rewards peoples' greed!

Not to mention the greed exhibited by the people who established capitalist systems in the first place...

japhy already answered this

[KUTradition]

ousie, how do you get people to stop being assholes?

[ousdahl]

you don't.

That's why you try to implement systems to offset and mitigate assholery, rather than enable and reward it.

Governmental democracy didn't exactly come easy. It took a bunch of like-minded assholes pooling their collective assholeness together in difficult, sometimes brutal terms, to over come a singular asshole monarch in power.

but if we can achieve, in theory at least, some sense of "all people are created equal" in a governmental sense despite our latent asshole tendencies, then maybe we can achieve some sort of better economic equality too

perhaps even up to and including equal protection from the threat of climate change.

[ousdahl]

or - to answer that question another way...

maybe not so many people would be assholes if they didn't have to exist in some sorta survival mode, and their basic needs were better satisfied?

Perhaps crime is less correlated with people simply being assholes (or being attributed to some other race or class divide), and is more correlated with material conditions?

If you aren't hungry in the first place, you're a lot less likely to steal bread.

[Overlander]

I accept your surrender.

Fucking awesome

[ousdahl]

sigh.

[ousdahl]

…if capitalism really is so great at things like creating surpluses of food, then how come so many people still deal with hunger and food insecurity in a capitalist-dominated global market?

because humans are fallible and most people suck. how many tons (literally, tons) of food winds up in landfills annually?

it’s really no different than louis viton destroying their unsold goods rather than discounting them or donating them to the impoverished…gotta keep that bottom line

but that’s got less to do with capitalism than it does peoples’ greed

but that's the thing!

How are you able to distinguish capitalism from peoples' greed when capitalism is basically a system that enables and rewards peoples' greed!

Not to mention the greed exhibited by the people who established capitalist systems in the first place...

japhy already answered this

what, what?

can you clarify please?

[Deleted User 863]

*welcome to meltdown mode*

[ousdahl]

come now, ye rich, and weep and wail for the miseries that are coming upon you!

[KUTradition]

but that's the thing!

How are you able to distinguish capitalism from peoples' greed when capitalism is basically a system that enables and rewards peoples' greed!

Not to mention the greed exhibited by the people who established capitalist systems in the first place...

japhy already answered this

what, what?

can you clarify please?

only because you said please

…eventually the most successful hunter gatherers gained power and control over the others.

this isn’t all that different from the point i made in the war thread…and gets to the question i asked earlier: how do you stop people from being assholes?

[ousdahl]

ah...thanks.

I wonder when that changed, then?

For the longest time, hunter-gatherers worked with other hunter-gatherers, and shared the yields with the rest among their community.

But at some point, one hunter-gatherer successfully managed to say, "you guys go do all the work and take all the risk of all the hunting and gathering, but then instead of bringing the yields back and sharing them with our community, let me take your yields from you and hoard them on my yacht"

and somehow...some way....everybody else went along with it?!

and re: the question you asked earlier, how do you stop people from being assholes, I answered that a couple different ways.

[japhy]

Gotta go.

There is a town full of workers in the poorest part of Colorado that need affordable housing. I am putting together a scheme using my greasy capitalist guile to build some, and to have bulk of the money changing hands flow to the locals who were there before me. In the process I will indoctrinate them in my evil ways.

We are also working on a community garden. We have been sponsoring a community meal for a couple of years and it has been a thing that brings together the community for a couple of hours to work and share a meal. We think adding a community garden to the mix gets the community working together for several months and then produces food for the meal. There was a suggestion that if we called it a "harvest dinner" that we should invite the migrant workers who actually harvest the food being grown in the valley. Agribusiness is the economic vehicle that moves our valley economy forward. The 2500 migrant workers from Guatemala are the engine that powers that vehicle. So the thought is we should invite the workers to the dinner and feed them if this is truly to be a "celebration of the harvest". I can dig it.

We tried to lure the farmworkers to our last event. We rented a bus for the evening and the movies and music were free. The bus pickup was at the Dollar General's parking lot where they mostly shop. But because of rainfall delaying the start of the harvest, they were working until 9:00 PM at night that weekend because the potatoes needed to get out of the ground or they rot. And I don't doubt that there was some suspicion of friendly Americans telling them they should, "get on the bus, we are going to take you somewhere nice!". In the end one guy got on the bus and went to see the show. It doesn't help that they mostly speak a dialect that is a mix of Mayan and Spanish that few local people can speak other than my buddy Joaquin who was also in the field until 9:00 PM and he just wanted to go home and sleep after work.

There are lots of unforeseen reasons why good intentions don't work out. But we will keep working on it. We aren't revolutionary big thinkers trying to change the world or even our country. Just changing one small town for the better is a daunting task if you really get involved and make a good faith effort. We are part of a small experiment in making the place where we live better while engaging and bridging communities in the process.

[ousdahl]

that's a great story, Japhy.

Noble too.

But, just realize, espousing the virtues of a community garden is an anecdote completely at odds with your determination to otherwise double down on capitalist systems.

That is, unless, this story ends with "and then I took all the produce from the garden and hoarded it for myself and told the workers "just cuz you planned it and grew it and picked it doesn't mean a thing, cuz all that all along was and is the private property of ME, don't you know how this works? Good luck trying to get people to stop being assholes, you assholes!"

[KUTradition]

not all the produce, just the choice stuff