Billionaires - Pearls Before Swine
Billionaires - Pearls Before Swine
I honestly believe Stephan Pastis is a better and more insightful satirist than anything you would see on (for example) The Daily Show.
I honestly believe Stephan Pastis is a better and more insightful satirist than anything you would see on (for example) The Daily Show.
I might even agree, but I want to add that that's damn high praise because The Daily Show is no slouch either.
I agree, it's high praise. And deserved.
I mean as much as I do like the Daily Show, a lot of it is, "here's the dumb shit that happened today." It's funny satire, but it's less insightful.
couple decades back, some study claimed that people who watched the Daily Show with Jon Stewart knew more about current events than anyone who watched any of the network news programs
This is where the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" (or billionaire) come into play. That's the most relevant form of being a class traitor.
I mean with only 300 billion, we could make 300,000 new millionaires. If you took that from Musk, he’d still have over 100 billion dollars all to himself.
Yes, that's what I mean. What you described happened and it's a core part of how capitalists build up a popular base. The temporarily embarrassed ones are looking up to the ones who are actual millionaires. Don't worry, they get that money back in the end.
With wealth, like properties, shares and various "passive income", the class interests of the former working class person tend to turn into capitalist class interests: lower taxation, more deregulation, more personal and family wealth accumulation, more welfare and aid for "business owners", smaller social welfare systems (for the masses) with private (and exclusively expensive) alternatives, and so on.
From the horse owner's mouth: How FDR Saved Capitalism
it's been too late for the "let's all work together!!" approach for years
it is now the owner class, their nazi sheep supporters, and everyone who's not in that club that they want to kill
I think you are ignoring the message at the end of this comic about why they have supporters.
yes. from birth to death, americans are force-fed a steady diet of lies, distractions, american exceptionalism--on top of the guilt, fear, and shame pounded into their skulls by religion
i work at an academic library. not only are kids woefully unprepared for higher education, but they are coming into the world without even a grasp of how to think critically about the information they're being presented with, let alone why
the comic is correct, for sure, but my point stands
Division is created by choice. The left saw the same news, read the same lies and heard the same bullshit, but we did not became hateful and ignorant racist and mysoginist. The right isn't the right because the billionaire pushed them that way; they choose to be like that and used the billionairs lies as reason for it. They became that way because they wanted to be that way.
We tried for decades to work with them to make the world a better place for everybody. They don't give a shit. So why should we?
Fuck them and fuck the billionaires. The left is big enough to kill them both. We just have to do it. Cut the cancer out!
I have no idea why you think people inside a Fox News/Newsmax/etc. right ring media bubble are absorbing the same news. They very much are not. 10 minutes spent on either source, or many, many other right-wing sources and you will be in a different, and very much fictional, universe.
The point is, they are there of their own free will. They want to be lied to. They want to use it to justify their inherent hatred. They are not good people who have been seduced by evil. They are evil. Maybe not all of them but most. You can't talk with them, you can not convert them back to good.
Or maybe i'm just bitter and frustrated, who knows.
"it's not that I have different experiences, it's that I'm inherently superior"
Great claim. Why are you generically superior then?
I broadly agree with the message in this comic but... Isn't the 664 billionaires thing a bit misleading? It ignores all the inflation and population growth that has happened in the past 30 years.
The difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is a thousand. Population isn't 10 times larger than it was 30 years ago. Inflation hasn't grown by a thousand percent in 30 years. None of the things you named can account for an order of magnitude increase in the number of billionaires. Nothing you said can account for them holding a larger percentage of the total wealth. It's not like when there was 60 and now that there are 664 that they both had the same relative proportion of the wealth. The wealth gap is increasing. So that hundred-plus million number that they hold more wealth than keeps getting larger and that number is growing faster than the population.
The correct number of billionaires is zero.