Not sure why image didn’t embed before but anyway NHK has just informed me that Bezos will be riding one of his own rockets into space next month. So maybe that was the genesis of the cartoon.
As a former aerospace guy, I give him some credit for having the balls to do this. No way other billionaires are doing it. Trump couldn’t afford all the diaper changes he’d need.
https://twitter.com/BillBramhall/status/1401926133264916480?s=19
Branson.
Whoever can do same day grocery delivery to me will have my money.
He might not be so keen, now that he won’t be first. But I’ll concede there could be one or two, especially if it can be coupled with a tax evasion scheme.
19th century unions were very racist dude.
Everyone in the 19th century was very racist lol. I’m talking about the militancy and lack of reliance on government protection to organize.
Some very very large labor unions were racially integrated in the early 20th and that was threatening and targeted by capital and their servants (police, KKK).
(Ponied - also should include the IWW of course)
perhaps they were primed to be militant since they were willing to fight for segregation. i’m mostly pulling this from a chapter of Color of Law.
i’m not arguing that the impetus for labor movement wasn’t robber barons and concentrated economic power. just saying sometimes organizers coopted other issues to gain members.
example in Color of Law talked about already-segregated white communities being geographically locked into employment at one plant, and organizing against integration, forcing black workers at the plant to travel from further away. it just shows you gotta be a big tent party. being on the wrong side of even one issue diminishes whatever progress is achieved.
Are you just a happy-go-lucky fellow who constantly lols IRL or is this a special feature of your writing?
Life at the time of the oldest human fossil was precarious. That doesn’t say much to me about human nature apart from the survival instinct of hunter-gatherers. One can conjure up images of early humans killing each other for fun or over relatively trivial things but I don’t know if there’s any evidence of this.
No one will argue that humans haven’t been extraordinarily violent in armed conflicts but getting back to your phrase
sure, humans are a lot more stupid than they like to think but individually selfish? No, not per se.
The most selfish individuals tend to be found in wealthier areas and the least selfish in poor areas. Some other areas untouched by capitalism and pretty much untouched by national government/police/courts are remarkably co-operative and peaceful and contradict the selfish/violent view.
Honestly it’s a poor attempt to make what I have to say seem less hostile. And yes I do it irl a good bit too. My entire sense of humor is probably a defense mechanism.
Maybe it’s just me but the lols make the post more hostile, not less.
lots of sympathy here
deleting most of this
I grew up poor and I can say with a great deal of certainty that few things will make a person as selfish as desperation. It’s like when a person is drowning and their lizard brain suddenly becomes willing to use the person trying to rescue them as a life preserver to get air. And poverty basically means being desperate some non zero % of the time. It’s true that poor people help each other out more than rich people do, but that has more to do with the fact that trading favors is an absolutely necessary survival skill when you’re going to be desperate a non zero % of the time than any innate lack of selfishness.
I’ve never seen a rich person sell their child sexually to buy drugs, but I sure have seen a poor person do it.
I feel like a lot of people on this board have an idealized idea of what life is like in places ‘untouched by capitalism’ as though those societies don’t have their own very real problems. It’s because everyone regardless of background or economic class is a human and humans are on average absolute trash.
this is some kind of a sentence. I mean, just objectively, it’s a got a certain quality to it.
I mean it’s like nobody here had a shitty childhood in poverty lol. There’s absolutely no honor or goodness innate to poverty. They’re just people doing people things.
I’m against the idea of there not being a strong monopoly on violence. That doesn’t mean I don’t think that in certain situations the right move is to threaten to seize the monopoly on violence if your demands aren’t met.
I’ve always found the libertarians to be ridiculous because it has always been obvious to me that what they really want is for the government to meet their needs from the social compact and give absolutely nothing in exchange to anyone else. Strong property rights are a good thing in general, but they absolutely must be given in exchange for something for those without property. Not being allowed to have a raiding season like humans have had for most of recorded history and all of nonrecorded history (which is about 98% of the time we’ve been humans) is a surprisingly big ask when you’re worried about starving to death.
Yes and that’s kind of my point. Humans are awful full stop. They’ve always been awful and will probably always be awful. Any solution to any problem has to work around their awfulness and preferably exploit it to get them to do what we need them to do.
Rich people do different awful shit than poor people in the same way that they eat different food, entertain themselves differently, and do different things to make money. Trust me when I say I’m not saying they aren’t awful. They very very clearly are. I still have never seen a rich person sell their kid for drugs. Sell their kid out in other ways? Sure probably I didn’t grow up rich.
There’s no such thing as human nature. You’re just making things up.