So, they want… a company town

Won’t someone think of the billionaires!?

Please tell me you mock him roundly for it.

People who want money or resources. You have to remember though, these aren’t the brilliant businessmen they think they are.

Most of these rich people are rich through family and luck, and believe they have magical powers to resurrect businesses and economies with a snap of their fingers.

They think they’ll just put everything back together with them at the top. They really have no idea how they’ll do that, of course.

Translation: hey rich customers, fire sale and reason to lay off your highest-paid employees incoming!

Remember, they and the people who listen to them wanted this.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’

-Isaac Asimov, 1980

But governments give money to everyone, not just the white ‘deserving Christian poor’. And in the end, that’s what they care about more: making sure the aid only goes to people they approve of. If it’s fewer people all the better, because suffering is godly or something like that.

I know it’s been getting a lot of mileage on Lemmy lately, but:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

• Wilholt’s Law

He figured he was in the first group, and since conservatives tend to think women are property, he figured her being with him put her in that group too. Whoops.

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.

-Sir Terry Pratchett

And over a third looked at his platform, shrugged, said ‘eh, who cares; I’m not going to bother to vote; not as if I’ll be impacted anyways.’

They decided a criminal, Nazi-lover, and grifter isn’t that different from a PoC woman who at least wanted to run a sensible and functional government (even if some of her policies weren’t the best).

Which means, since they didn’t think Trump was a problem, they were fine with this outcome. They don’t care that this happened.

Remember how gas use plummeted during the pandemic and prices really didn’t?

They’ll just do that again

Video game character names be like

I mean, I get that it’s a metaphor.

The answer to the MAGA thing is simply that you build, not for them, but in spite of them. You build for everyone. If you want to exclude people who aren’t willing to follow the rules of society and only cause trouble you can, but that’s different than refusing to build anything because they might use it.

The people like MAGA that only seek to tear down what others build, or who refuse to build at all because there’s a chance someone who they don’t approve of (ie PoC) will use it hurt not only themselves, but everyone around them. They are destroying the future by refusing to help build the present, and I think it’s really sad that they would rather a terrible future than one that has things they don’t like in it.

We must build despite those attitudes, or we will simply end up following them into a bad future.

They meant the question showed a viewpoint that seemed to center entirely around you (also a rather libertarian thing, honestly).

‘Someone who would never build something for you’ sounds a bit like you’re expecting a tit-for-tat, I-do-this-for-you-so-you-have-to-do-something-for-me in everything, and that’s just not how societies work.

I’m curious; are you using that phrase to refer to, say, rich assholes who just take and take, or Nazi assholes that would rather cut off their own hands than build something a black person might use? Or are you using it to refer to people like severely disabled folks, or say, low-functioning autistic people, who society supports but who don’t have much capacity to ‘return the favor’?

Or are you just referring to future generations, who will be around after you’re gone?

I think it’s just your question comes off as nihilistic and a little bit libertarian, and neither of those is mentally healthy really

Japanese don’t. Unless it’s one of them in blackface.

Seriously, the racism there is painful.

1. Because if the US gets rid of the problem, we don’t have a convenient ‘other’ enemy to point to when we want to dump money into the military or give an excuse for MAGAts to attack Mexican-Americans.

2. Because then we wouldn’t have an excuse to invade Mexico. And make no mistake, he wants us to invade Mexico. Fascists need wars and ‘other’ enemies in order to keep people in their borders distracted and supportive.

Canada is in danger too. His handlers need a war and they want resources, and Canada has a lot of natural resources to plunder.

But he’ll go for Mexico first because it’s filled with brown people who we’ve been told are all terrorists who sneak over the border to take our jobs. It’s an easier target.

Don’t for a second think it’s by accident. This was done to make areas less accessible to ‘undesirables’. After builders and realtors were told to stop forcing PoC into specific areas, they just went ahead and built suburbs that you basically had to have a car to access, ensuring poorer people were kept out.

‘Tell me I’m part of an in-group. That I’m great and that I belong and that nothing will change that. Then show me an out-group, and make them suffer so I can feel even better about being in the in-group.’

That is what Conservatives have been asking for. That is what they really want. And he’s giving it to them, as a thank-you for getting him into office.

See also: ‘He’s not hurting the right people!’

The bonus is this also advances the Nazi agenda.

Ball Pythons (unless you’re in Europe; they usually call them Royal Pythons).