That’s more commonly a US thing and it’s like, “Americans saved from America.” whether health, education, or some basic social service that’s being used for profiteering.
“Amazing! This group of people crowd-funded a medical procedure!”
That’s the subreddit I’m missing here…
… the orphan-crushing one?
What’s a subreddit?
What’s Reddit, you mean?
It’s an advertising platform masquerading as a forum trying to be a social media site.
What’s Red?
What?
Wha?
W?
V?
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Ah u know… That thing. That thing that… Ah never mind.
The problem with these rage inducing subreddits is that they seldom seem to propose or encourage any solution or alternative. So it ends up becoming a kind of circle jerk of learned helplessness.
It seems like a common internet thing. Rage bait and learned helplessness. We learn to accept that there’s nothing to do because people and politicians are idiots because “look at all this stuff”.
And often this aligns with advertising tech because it makes us engaged and seeking comfort of continued scrolling when we get a steady stream of anxiety injections. It’s low key like an abusive relationship.
God forbid a community focused on showcasing a certain trope actually focus on showcasing that trope…
The old subreddit was associated with leftist political subreddits anyway, so the connection to actual discourse is there regardess
Furthermore, the comments sections always abound with discussions of potential solutions
Respectfully, I don’t think one can just suggest a solution to what is fundamentally problem of decades of economic propaganda and miseducation. The number of morons that believe in Adam Smith and market self-corrections like they are forces as natural as the tide is truly staggering insane, ansld is a direct result of generations of neoliberalism seeping into education.
There’s no easy solution. There’s hardly a hard solution at this point. The solution is to make memes, and to yell, and to make the issue so readily apparent it can be unavoidable and understood by these very same people let down by their education. So subreddits memeing is good, overall.
Yeah, because everybody knows the obvious answer. It’s untethered capitalism. And no it hasn’t always been that way. Politicians weren’t always whores for the rich. That’s a rather recent development that can absolutely be stopped by the will of the people.
As much as I respect your argument; the Romans. Or any civilisation really. It literally has always been that way.
I don’t know enough about Roman politics to contradict but “any civilisation really” is definitely too broad of a stroke.
Greed and corruption has been around for as long as land and money have.
Sure. But it only really becomes a problem in very large communities. A chieftain overseeing 50-100 villagers isn’t as easily corrupted.
At that point, the scale is just different. That’s when the brother of the chief gets to build his new hut on the nice hill.
Lol, that’s the mildest form of corruption I can imagine.
But do you really think a village has zoning laws in the first place?
At that scale, it’s also much easier to just remove the chief’s son from his hut on the “nice hill”. And the chief along with him. Scale being the key factor is the essence of my argument.
Are you implying that the US, and the Roman’s, never had a period of growth and expansion that wasn’t late stage capitalist rot?
The comment isn’t saying this never happens really, it’s saying it doesn’t have to. This is capitalism with no guardrails.
The US and Rom were always run by and for the Ruling Classes never for the people.
Before Caesar, Rome actually had checks and balances to keep one person from amassing too much influence. For example, they had two consuls, which was the highest political position at the time and acted like as the heads of state.
Until Caesar fucked up those systems by literally declaring himself “dictator for life”. So really, it’s not always been this way, it’s usually just a few individuals that keep fucking it up for everyone else. Until they end up with a knife in their back.
There were substantial conflicts between rich and poor Romans well before the end of the Republic. It was not uncommon for a lower class Roman to go off and fight with the army only to come home and find some rich fuck effectively squatting on his land.
This was turning into something of a large scale crisis 60+ years before Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. At the same time, politics was dominated by the wealthy and/or those who were successful military leaders.
The Republic didn’t really have “checks and balsnces” in some cases so much as “social conventions”. More a common understanding that something is just not done. They were actually rather Ill equipped to deal with individuals who had a thirst for power. Tiberius Gracchus, who served as Tribune, gave away lots of state owned land to some of the poorer Romans. He did so without consulting the Senate which raised a lot of eyebrows. When he attempted to stand for a second term as Tribune in 133 B.C. – which was just “not done” – the Senate responded by murdering him.
Tiberius’ brother, was elected as Tribune. He went further than Tiberius and sponsored a whole bunch of legislation which would have benefited poorer Romans. The Senate responded by murdering him as well. Over the next few decades, there were a handful of successful military leaders who clamored for more and more power. At the same time, the public was growing increasingly dissatisfied with the Republican government.
Julius Caesar was smart enough to recognize that the Republic was becoming frail and ballsy enough to give it a good shove down the stairs. In 82 B.C. he marched his legion into Rome – a clear act of treason – and effectively declared himself dictator. He was met with little resistance. He was viewed as a champion of the poor in some ways and, based on the way the Republic treated poor Romans, they were probably looking for a champion.
There were others who wanted to wrest Caesar’s newly acquired power from him. Pompey, another successful Roman general, went to war with Caesar. Pompey had the support of the wealthy Aristocrats. Pompey lost.
The Senate murdered Caesar in 44 B.C. Caesar’s supporters responded by killing his assassins. Then they turned on each other. That marked the beginning of another civil war from which Octavian, Julius’ nephew and adopted son, ultimately emerged victorious. By then, the Republic was effectively dead.
To make a long story short, Julius Caesar didn’t break the system. It was already broken. He managed to exploit it further than than anyone else had up until then but there were glaring cracks in the foundation of the Republic that directly contributed to it’s demise. The imbalance of power between the elite and the poor was definitely a big “crack”.
The Roman and the Greek “Democracies” where only for the slave Owners. It was always like this. But they can be overthrown.
As much as I respect your argument; the Romans. Or any civilisation really. It literally has always been that way.
[Citation needed]
If you ever wonder why there’s an ORPHAN CRUSHING MACHINE and why they need $20k to prevent the use of it. It was because there’s this one llama with a hat that is trying to build a Meat Dragon to impress his mate named paul
Give man a fish and they call you a communist. Create a baby crashing machine and they call you shrewd businessman. Or something like this.
No, no, it’s asking why he has no fish that gets you called a communist.
Hey that orphan-crushing machine is a constitutionally enshrined right. I have the right to mount that thing on wheels and drive it around to crush up orphans wherever I want! And if somebody tries to stop me and gets caught up in and jams the mechanism, I have the right to sue his estate for damages!
Listen, we here are Orphan Crushing Incorporated are a family business…
Will nobody think of the jobs in the orphan crushing industry?
Of course it’s a mystery. An honest discussion about why orphan-crushing machines need to exist would lead to an honest discussion about where your society’s pain really comes from.
And the owner class doesn’t want that discussion to happen. Because it would come out that they don’t pay their fair share of the tax burden, which would keep orphan-crushing machines from existing in the first place.
Just read one like that:
That one showed up just before this post in my feed!
I miss Achewood
I heard Onstad came back and was doing new Achewood content behind a paywall but I have been too poor to pay and see if he has still got the chops.
I miss Ray and Beef and Teodor and Philipe and Cornelius and Lyle and Nice Pete and the rest of the gang, all the way up to Trouble Man and No-No.
Dear god if only he could get the complete Achewood released.
And Todd, don’t forget about Todd
Shame his animated show deal fell through (or simply never took off) but yeah I don’t know if I want to pay for something that appears to not have been updated since May
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Orphan Crushing Machines Inc to the moon, no paper hands
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We all could do with less salt in our lives.
Speak for yourself, I’m not interested in reducing my salary!
And now I’m thinking about the Roman Empire.
It’s called Effective Altruism!
In short, effective altruism is commonly viewed as being about the moral obligation to donate as much money as possible to evidence-backed global poverty charities, or other measurable ways of making a short-term impact.
Just be the philanthropist that your broke ass wants to be.
Work 120 hours a week so you can receive 15% of the value you generate as a paycheck. Then take the 75% you receive from that after the tax man and donate it to a charity. It’s so simple.
You want to be a better human? Just work more, and then donate more.
Or just actually work for a charitable organization if you’re not super rich. Like a doctor is important to humanitarian aid, but so is getting them to and from the area, so is student loan forgiveness as med school is incredibly costly, they also have to offer their workers a (paltry) salary and per diem, etc, which is where the money is quite important.
Could it be done differently in a better society that we should absolutely be working towards? Yes. Can and should we also congratulate the people in our society for working with what they have? Yes.
IDK why people are downvoting my post. That’s literally what that is.
I visited a talk with Peter Singer in Washington, D.C. a few years ago where people applauded a guy who had considered joining an NGO and decided to become an investment broker and donate to Effective Altruism instead. 🤔
