This is photoshopped… the picture was with mitt Romney and trump with his shiteating grin… why the edit?
As I live alone and pay $500 a month just to be able to see a doctor, I am more and more enraged yet disillusioned the older I get. This is not living—this is fascistic technofeudalism.
What do you think “the left” is??
The only war is a class war.
The only tragedy is our lives.
Messaging aside, be aware that this photo is edited, Musk wasn’t originally in it.
Wasn’t it Ted Cruz originally?
EDIT: ah it was Mitt Romney.
“this isn’t right vs left, this is right vs left”
uh… okay?
No, this is Good vs Evil. Right vs Wrong. Truth vs Deception. But yeah, Billionaires are the dark half of those and develop extreme sociopathic megalomaniacal malignant narcissism apparently. How else can we explain it?
Medicare can’t help a guillotine
Good luck getting partisans to buy into this meme, but it is correct.
Left doesn’t mean the democrats.
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What these dumbasses don’t realize is that they do rely on these things - every minimum or even low wage worker absolutely needs these services to make ends meet. These people aren’t just evil, they’re stupid.
They’re in a cult.
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How did low wage workers survive throughout history without Medicare and Medicaid?
They died substantially more often and sooner. Look up the working conditions prior to the union wars in the US.
How much is “substantially”? And why do you think union wars were the reason for the decrease in deaths? Maybe it’s just the technological progress or something.
Statistics tell me there is a relation between healthcare and life expectation.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health-expenditure
Note the US is the outlier here: that’s the only country in the world with significant spending and no universal healthcare system (only 10 countries in the world don’t have one). And even with that, medical debt is still the first cause of bankrupcy.
If you slash medicaid, you go to the left of that chart, but you also go down. That’s a political choice, really.
Fortunately, enough institutions were torn apart that soon the US will also be the exception for being unable to provide numbers for the years to come.
Because I’m not deluding myself. You wanna continue being a dip shit regarding how improved workplace conditions decreased workplace deaths be my guest. I’m gonna actually use my brain, though.
EDIT: got alittle heated and used some mentally ableist language. I’m trying to break that habit so I’ve edited that language to reflect that.
Fight a class war, not a culture war.
And you, who thinks you are in the “upper class” by making 500k a year. You’re not, you are among the poor.
We fight the people who own billions, not you.
500k a year is a doctor or something. Someone who actually contributes to society. That’s someone who should be rich because of how hard they worked to get there plus how important they are to our society. Elon musk shouldn’t get paid a fucking dime.
Elon isn’t getting paid. He’s not a wage worker.
Semantics
I mean technically how they make that 500k matters. If it’s all just being a landlord we are definitely fighting them too.
We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it. Let’s handle the people owning a thousand homes first. Then move on the ones who own a dozen or less.
I’d disagree. Though I understand where you are coming from. I’m not saying behead the petty landlords first. However, often times the easiest way to fuel class consciousness is on these easier fights. Obviously a mom and pop single property landlord isn’t making 500k a year I’m not talking about grandmas that have a property as their retirement savings.
But these small petty bourgeoisie (think the dude on tiktok telling people how to make passive income) of 10-100 tenants are often the ripe conditions for the creation of tenants unions which can fuel class consciousness. They lack the power of large capital and the power of state violence in the same way. I think material support to these areas absolutely helps the working class.
But we might just be disagreeing on definitions here.
Don’t fight class war.
Why did they photoshop the miserable Mitt Romney dinner picture
Oh my, his anguished face. This is a work of art.
because that, without context, might make someone feel sympathy for one of these ghouls.
But surely there are enough pictures out there of those ghouls together that you don’t need to create fake ones. There’s enough misinformation on the internet as it is.
even if there wasn’t any misinformations on the internet, you still wouldn’t need to create new ones.
libs don’t give a shit about truth. they literally can’t understand the idea. telling a liberal the truth is like reading poetry to your dog. it’s a sweet romantic idea, and maybe it makes you a good person, but only the tone actually matters.
i guess you’re wrong about that. what you’re referring to is the fallacy that all liberals are extremely short-sighted and can’t make reasonable decisions, which is why they’re constantly manipulated and that causes them to be liberal in the first place.
there are liberals who can see reason.
if they could see reason in 2025, they wouldn’t be liberals anymore, I don’t think. the only thing liberalism ever had going for it was a big tent that could at least get its distasteful monkey paw version of good things done, and now they don’t even want to do that.
lemmy has convinced me that neither conservatives nor communists know what a liberal is.
life has convinced me that liberals certainly don’t. I guess if we’re both right, only we anarchists can see the truth. as if my ego needed that.
“Liberal” means different things in Europe vs America, and that confusion has been specifically exploited by propagandists as well, just making things worse.
I myself am a stupid american. I cannot say that I’ve read any great works of philosophy that discuss the espoused ideals of political movements.
What I have read are dictionary definitions. I have observed how people behave, what people think these words mean, and how almost everyone who gives themselves a label is either a liar or just wrong. Obviously, this is about the american versions of the words.
Liberals: “everything sucks, but it could suck less if we put in a tiny amount of effort to fix things. You may be mildly inconvenienced by these efforts.”
Conservatives: “everything sucks and it’s the libs’ fault! They changed things and now everything sucks! Fuck {insert racial slur here}!”
Communists: “everything sucks and it’s the libs’ fault! They’re just as fascist as the conservatives because capitalism!”
Republicans: “We’re conservatives!” (they’re actually fascists)
Democrats: “We’re liberals!” (some of them are, but most of them are conservatives. Also spineless failures, but that part isn’t important to this conversation.)
Am I on to something here, or am I just stupid?
fuck yeah, invisible, like the ring of power. that’s… that’s what this is, right?
yeah, that seems to me how people use these words
nevertheless, “liberalism” used to have an actual definition. it meant somebody would would say “things are allowed unless they are forbidden”, which is contrary to the anti-liberal (sometimes identified as conservative) view that “things are forbidden unless they are allowed”, which means, liberals don’t bother with things that don’t matter.
now, if you’re a trans girl shitting in a public toilet, that doesn’t matter because it doesn’t really change anything. that is why liberalism says “ok, it shouldn’t be forbidden, so by default it’s allowed” while anti-liberalists claim “i don’t see why these people are doing this, therefore they are faking it (being trans) and also it should be a crime until proven innocent”.
Yeah in europe liberals are liberals, while in america liberals are liberals but it must not interfere with capitalist interests
Here’s a work going through every major liberal philosopher and what liberalism meant to them, and how they dealt with the contradictions. It’s the same definition used in every serious work for the last 200 years or so.
This confuses a lot of Americans whose political understanding is largely dictated by cable news, because since 1980 or so, conservatives started using liberal to mean “far left” as a pejorative due to Reagan calling Carter’s policy too liberal. Later on, the American “left”, social democrats, started using it to mean the same thing, but in a positive context.
I’ll read that, but not today. For the sake of responding within the current month, I had chatgpt summarize it for me. The gist I get is that “liberalism” is a lie, and it’s secretly fascism (I’m paraphrasing the summary pretty hard), benefiting the in-groups and oppressing everyone else. Would you say this is an accurate, if oversimplified, description of what you want me to understand?
Not really, it’s more that liberalism contains contradictions between various freedoms it supports, and even contradictions between how the same “freedom” is practiced by different groups, and when those contradictions become unsustainable, the right to property by the dominant group always takes precedence.
It’s important to understand any political philosophy as not an idea floating in a vacuum but as a social tool used by a group in society; liberalism is the philosophy the bourgeoisie use to justify their power.
I mean kinda since fascism is a tool used to buttress capitalism when it’s own contradictions become unsustainable, but that’s not really in the book.
We’re not “confused”, we have a different variant of English and a different definition for “liberal”.
Reads as: I hate it when people have more money than me
The wealth gap can’t simply be captured by “more money”. Here’s my favorite visualization of the wealth gap for the ultra-rich. Enjoy!
