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Top-level
Katherine Cox-Buday
@aral we could have a conv about isms, but if we start with where we're at, we have to look at why there's no $ in this. I believe these are contributing: 1. People aren't aware that things could be better. I'm not sure if that last one is on purpose or an emergent property of a deeply sick society. Fix these and I think you fix the problem. 7 comments
Katherine Cox-Buday
@avocado_toast @aral I am in agreement with you that there are larger, entrenched, forces at play. I still think that at the root of everything is that people are stretched so thin these days that they can't even have higher-order thoughts. That is, they can't contemplate why things are the way they are let alone how to fix them. Society is people in the end.
Avocado Toast
@katco @aral society is people, sure, but the way it's driven and organized is guided by far fewer. There are people at the top of the pyramid with vast powers of allocation, dispersement, and influence. In the government that's the President, Congressional leaders, the Fed, Supreme Court, and the Treasury. In the "private sector" that's the Forbes 500 list and C-suite people. The President can invent a phrase (e.g. WMDs) and have it coming out of the mouths of ordinary citizens within a week.
Avocado Toast
@katco @aral we've wrestled with this problem before in this country. I think only the war profiteering is new because prior to WW1 and WW2 we weren't a superpower with a fully realized military-industrial complex. But the robber barons and their influence over governmental policy looks a lot like the late 1800s. We're (IMO) living through a second gilded age.
Katherine Cox-Buday
@avocado_toast @aral this is all true. Go one step beyond the analysis: what's the solution? How would one affect change? I'm convinced that at the bottom of it is what I've said: we need lots of people to understand these things and people are being denied the resources to do so.
Avocado Toast
@katco @aral I don't think it is possible for one (ordinary) person to affect change. However, collectively we can. I think there are people out there doing their best to affect change. I think labor leaders are good examples of that. People were spread thin and hurting during the last gilded age as well. It was only through their perseverance that we had the labor movement and obtained things like social security and the minimum wage. |
Gregory's Server
@katco @aral our society is organized mainly around weapon development, big, lumbering corporations, and consumer entrepreneurship.
Things that don't serve one of the above have slim to no route to making money. It's not about socializing the problems or bringing awareness to them. It's not that we don't know what we need to do to solve them either. It's that we, as a society, with the Fed doing the bank transfers allocate our resources mostly to giant companies and military contractors.