Mastodawn

punIssuer Dec 12

@BrianJopek #altText4you Tumblr post by quasi-normalcy:
The fact that you can't raise taxes on billionaires even slightly without them putting money into fascist political movements is, of itself, evidence that billionaires as a class shouldn't be allowed to exist in the first place.

Robin Barton Dec 12

@BrianJopek That is so very true. The aristocracy has too much money and too much power that is untethered to any country any belief in democracy or human rights

Alerta! Alerta!Dec 12

I am happy that I lived in the 2 centuries that actually embraced democracy. Before it was kings, dukes, bishops and popes, After it will be CEOs and Shareholders

Looks like the majority of people just want to be ruled so they don't have to think themselves and always have someone they can blame for their misery.

Reg Dec 12

It's true that there's been many social improvements over course of the last century, but the trajectory over centuries has been to the detriment of dictators.

I don't think ppl want to be ruled so much as we just keep making the mistake of letting dictators take control before knocking them down and restoring order again.

Alerta! Alerta!Dec 12

@ReggieHere @BrianJopek Dictators can only take control when the majority doesn't object.

Reg Dec 12

Absolutely, but they have the 'Better to ask forgiveness than permission' mindset, and people don't realise what's happening until it's too late.

Alerta! Alerta!Dec 12

@ReggieHere @BrianJopek

People do realize.

And they don't mind.

On the contrary...

Yes! Most.of them don't care about facts
They care about feelings. And that's what dictators provide.

Facts are complicated. Feelings are easy.

Reg Dec 15

You may well be right, but history suggests that people will 'wake up' and fight to change things.....eventually. I guess that's why the fascists weaponised 'woke'.

Alerta! Alerta!Dec 15

@ReggieHere

Does it? People will "wake up" when their own life is severely negatively affected. So as long as you are able to not severely affect the life of the majority (and that does not need to be a huge majority) no one will raise!

And yes! "severely affected" can depend on the nationality...

But in general: Dumb and poor people are easier to rule. So make sure to keep them dumb and poor....

/cc @BrianJopek

Reg Dec 15

I think so. Would-be dictators learn from their predecessors' failures.

Agree on what you say about the poor, and that ties with the observation that change tends to occur when the middle classes are affected. The trajectory seems to be one of making the middle classes gradually poorer to reduce their power. The problem with the plan is an over-reliance on nationalism (which worked) and religious zeal that no longer exists in Western Europe.

Alerta! Alerta!Dec 15

@ReggieHere

The religious zeal still exists from what I see. The church of the masses might though have moved on to the one of Mercedes, Audi and BMW or AI or "Climate change is fake" or whatever else people will come up with to divert the masses and keep them occupied... 😁

"Don't look up"

/cc @BrianJopek

Reg Dec 15

True, consumerism isn't going anywhere (:

Over here we have what looks like an entirely-contrived Christian conversion of Tommeh Robinson who has apparently found God in prison. I still can't see it landing in post-Christian Western Europe, and even the large numbers of religious citizens of other faiths won't help much because that runs counter to the nationalist rhetoric.

@heiglandreas @ReggieHere @BrianJopek

George B Dec 12

Most people don't want to have to think about politics. They just want to live in a place where their basic requirements function without having to kick out a wannabe dictator who tries to make a power grab every so often

econads Dec 13

@heiglandreas @BrianJopek "Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw.
It was its tendency to bend at the knees."

#gnuterrypratchett

Colman Reilly Dec 12

@BrianJopek billionaires are a system failure: a diagnostic that your
economy is failing to allocate resources efficiently.

ZZ Bottom Dec 12

@BrianJopek 👍

Clinton Anderson SwordForHire Dec 12

Kill them

Eat them

Humphrey Archer Dec 12

@BrianJopek
Billionaires are a failure mode

Jennifer Williams Dec 12

@BrianJopek hello 👋

Dark Phoenix 🇺🇦🇨🇦🇬🇱🇵🇦🇵🇸🏳️‍🌈Dec 12

@BrianJopek
Exactly

Neil Moffatt Dec 12

@BrianJopek The 'grow the economy' mantra so glibly broadcast as if by default a legitimate and focal matter, avoids the best path - reduce the VAST levels of inequality across the world. Where 1 day of income for 1 obscenely wealthy person would provide for many in poverty for a year ...

Mad Scientist Dec 12

@BrianJopek "Better a pig than a fascist."

Alohilani Dec 12

@BrianJopek Billionaire seem to be very selfish individuals. In it for what they can get for themselves. No empathy or respect for others.

Randall Lee Dec 12

@BrianJopek When a millionaire becomes a billionaire they need to be captured and brought before the people to be turned into immortal stardust.

@BrianJopek you don't have to claim that every billionaire is a fascist supporter. That's probably untrue, populist and unnecessary. Among the 99.9 % poor (millionaires and below) there are so many far right, too.
We can agree that a society should always be better off without such inequality of wealth. So they really shouldn't be allowed to exist. Regardless of their political attitude or actions.

AndreaTvilling🙃🏳️‍⚧️🌈🌻🇺🇦🇪🇺Dec 13

@Biggi91 @BrianJopek well, ideas of unlimited self-enrichment beyond obscenity don't grow in glasshouses, they are born by human minds.

Lara Keller 1937 Dec 14

@Biggi91 @BrianJopek
The billionaires who are not funding the far-right, are funding the centre-left to do nothing about redistribution, which makes the far right more attractive as there is no alternative. How many billionaires have redistribution anxiety?

#Billionaires should be #taxed out of existence..

And the weird thing is they would still be super rich - AND - dumping all that tax money back into the economy would generate even more revenue for the super wealthy that own all the s*** we rely on...

It would juice the economy like a 2 or 3% fed rate cut..

Then they would be taxed again... more money dumped into the economy, they get rich again... It is a virtuous cycle.

Wulfy—Speaker to the machines Dec 13

@oldguycrusty @BrianJopek

Yes, but where is all the misery in you plan?

Cy Dec 13

They shouldn't, because it's not good enough. Taxing them doesn't work. When you tax the wealthy, they pay to have politicians elected who remove the taxes, or to add in loopholes for the lawyers, who the wealthy also pay. The more you try, the worse you'll fail.

What you need to do is eliminate their wealth. Cancel their contracts, repudiate the debts they're owed, close their banks, repossess their land, silence their politicians. If we do any less, then we'll all be their slaves, inevitably.

CC: @[email protected]

@cy @BrianJopek @oldguycrusty

Maho Dec 14

That's just democracy at work. If your populance is so impressionable that you can sway their opinion with a few million dollars worth of campaign budget, you have bigger problems than billionaires that start with education.

Switzerland manages to do just fine, with billionaires present.

But then, of course, Switzerland has a culture that encourages meaningful higher education and social cohesion over Jersey Shore and hyperindividualism.

Turns out if voters understands itself as citizens, instead of spectators in an interactive movie, they think before they vote. It's no coincidence the US voted not one, but two actors to become president, every single (elected) president since Kennedy was voted in based on better playacting on the campaign trail, and politicians all around the western world spend more on clothes and style consultants than on increasing their knowledge of a topic (again: exception being Switzerland).

Cy Dec 14

You would lose that culture overnight if there were any money to be made in going after Switzerland. You already do their banking, so why would they disrupt that precious little bubble of perceived safety? The US is a much more attractive target for collecting slaves.

CC: @[email protected] @[email protected]

Maho Dec 14

You are making a classical determinism mistake. Cultures are not soap bubbles that suddenly bursts when someone thinks 'money can be made'. Switzerland *is* an attractive target since at least 1875, and somehow, it did not become a chattel slave breeding ground.

Instead, they are the only actual state-level democracy in the world and their federalism remained. Why? Because all that was poured into institutions.

Switzerland does banking, but these days because they are stable and reliable, not because of the reasons you imply. In fact, 2025s Switzerland has probably more transparent banking than any other European country.

"Why would they disrupt?" Who are "they"? The Capital™ ? The US? A secret cabale of slavehunters?

How many slaves have they collected in the US?

Also, I'm not Swiss. But I'd like to be. They do a lot of things right

I envy your conviction, but these people have killed, tortured, and oppressed those in the USA into being absolute tools. You complain about culture there, when that culture was engineered by the ones who now use it against you, and there were USAers who fought for your ideals. They're just dead now. Nobody is special, no one is exceptional and you are not immune to propaganda. It's just been used against USAers more so they have none of that stuff, and it could all be taken away from the Swiss.

As for the cabal of slave hunters, ehh... check Epstein's list? Those two guys out of Apartheid South Africa? Doesn't really matter who specifically, only that there's people doing this and getting away with it. They enslaved the USA a long time ago, like... the 80's or so.

Maho Dec 15

I don’t deny power abuse, propaganda, or crimes by elites.
What I reject is the claim that everything is already lost, everyone is enslaved, and analysis is pointless.

The moment you say outcomes are predetermined, everything is rigged and dissent is just “proof of manipulation”, you’ve left politics and entered eschantologic theology.

I’m interested in systems that can still be influenced, not myths that excuse total resignation.
If you see no agency left anywhere, then this conversation can’t continue in good faith.

I don't mean to act like it's hopeless or anything, though I do feel pretty damn hopeless. What I'm saying is the USA didn't invite this upon themselves. It was slowly inflicted, from the country's inception on, something no one on Earth is immune to. I can't blame anyone in a toxic culture for getting screwed by it. What we need is to get people out of these abusive spirals, and not act like USAers are just bad people who choose not to educate themselves out of being manipulated. People in the USA are... fine, given half a chance. Target systems, not victims. And that means no billionaires. Even if they're the nicest, most well behaved, most Swiss billionaires who ever walked the earth.

Maho Dec 15

When I said there was an education problem, that was not the standard 'educate yourself' moralism; I was stating a structural prerequisite of democracy: voters must know things.

If you let fools and ignoramuses decide on national policy, do not be surprised when the results are a circus.

If you want a more stable society, you need to give education a higher value than the US does right now. It's not victim blaming, it's pointing towards the exit of a bad situation.

I disagree with your dichotomy of billionaires and victims - billionaires can be the result of certain systems - but we see just as many billionaires who rose in environments that were not as permissive as the US.

In fact, in billionaires per capita, the US does not even rank under the top 10 (they are place 11... behind capitalist hellholes like ... Sweden and Switzerland).

What you describe as “billionaire behaviour” therefore appears less like an inevitable consequence of wealth itself and far more like a pathology of specific US institutional, political, and cultural conditions.

By switching from systems over to billionaires, you make a structural problem a person problem, we've done that before, and much suffering was caused by that. Every revolution eventually comes to eat its children, when billionaire blood runs dry, and the guillotine thirsts for blood, new enemies will be found, and usually it's the useful idiots who cheered on the revolution's infancy.

Your last sentence concerns me most.
Decoupling individual behaviour from moral responsibility is incompatible with liberal democracy.

That logic is not emancipatory. It is classist - and depending on ideological framing, historically indistinguishable from racist or revolutionary marking systems that have reliably culminated in either societal collapse (as in the French Revolution), autocracy (as in the Third Reich or Soviet Russia), or both (as in the Khmer Rouge).

I didn't let people be uneducated. For some definition of education. No one let this happen. It was inflicted upon them. (See: the "No Child Left Behind" policy, among other awful things). You say the US doesn't place a high value on education, because you are accepting that only the billionaires get to decide what the US does. Of course they don't want their slaves educated! That doesn't make the slaves some kind of lazy layabouts who just let democracy slip away because they were too stupid to care about education.
we see just as many billionaires who rose in environments that were not as permissive as the US.
Then maybe permissiveness isn't the problem. Because you're sure not solving it if you're giving ALL your power to a few rich fucks. And what makes you think Swedish and Swiss billionaires aren't using the US as their playground, to keep their home town clueless of their actions? That's classic colonialism.

I personally don't know, but it is suspicious that places which turn away all refugees to any potential chaos and mayhem they cause just happen to be idyllic paradises.
Decoupling individual behaviour from moral responsibility is incompatible with liberal democracy.
Liberalism is compatible with fascism, so I would be very careful before accepting the words of the ignorant and racist John Locke, and the completely detached from reality Adam Smith. I do not think you can have a liberal democracy.

Maho Dec 15

> I didn't let people be uneducated.

So, what did you, personally, do to raise education levels? Remember: it takes a village to raise a child.

> And what makes you think Swedish and Swiss billionaires aren't using the US as their playground, to keep their home town clueless of their actions?

That's an extraordinary claim, and it deserves extraordinary evidence. You making the claim and then, in the very next sentence, admitting that you made it up does not inspire confidence.

> Liberalism is compatible with fascism

Oh boy. Well, have a nice day.

...fine. Enjoy your private property.

Count Holdem Dec 30

@cy @BrianJopek @oldguycrusty Communism and Capitalism favor a too-small ratio of wealth, instead of judicious symmetry. This math is the cause for the rise of Democratic Socialism - or, a 'sustainable middle'. Removing the abusers by the masses, must be persistent - even if it means they just retreat to their luxury bunkers.

But Authoritarian Autocracies are also on the rise, so your plans better be long term.

Mathias Hasselmann Dec 15

@oldguycrusty @BrianJopek During the Golden Age of America, when there was money to built today's infrastructure, libraries and to send people to the moon, maximum income tax in the US was way above 70%.

Prohibitive income taxes are a mandatory bug fix for economical inefficiencies that avoid people hording money, which should be invested in people, research and society instead. It was a crime to abandon prohibitive maximum income tax.

True...

Stefan Welebny Dec 19

@BrianJopek
I am tempted to agree, but then I think, there have always be forms of harmful political power concentration, in any system. If it's not billionaires it might be dictators only.