Bullshit, billionaires are too greedy and morally bankrupt to leave exploited money on the table.

They won’t close the highest producing stores and effectively kill a revenue stream out of conviction in something that isn’t money, because if they had any beliefs or values above “gimme gimme gimme moar moar moar” they wouldn’t be billionaires.

It’s not a matter of not needing it, no shit, they have a socially encouraged mental illness.

It would be better for the new socialist stores if they did vacate the market, but they won’t. They’ll even pull a Walmart and try to do some loss leaders to convince idiots that der free merket menes lower prices for as long as they can stomach it until they find a vector to make the state stores illegal and Jack those prices back up forever.

Still miss baconreader

Western psychology, and I say this as a former psychologist.

Like so much else, any potential at being a science was bastardized long ago in order to make it an industry focused on getting people productive again instead of focusing on their wellbeing which usually has an inverse relationship to getting them back to work in the short and medium term.

Meanwhile the small population of people that can afford actual psychoanalytic therapy that isn’t throwing pills at them and teaching them coping strategies within 3 covered sessions tend to be the reason so many others are miserable.

For the non-wealthy, mental healthcare in the US is a complete and utter scam that is geared to serve others at your expense and shoehorn you right back into the stressors that got you into therapy. If you need help, you’re out of luck.

As an atheist raised roman catholic, I disagree.

There are rules and tenets and ideals of the religion. It’s not about meeting them, but it is about wanting to and more strictly attempting to.

It’s not even a no true Scotsman fallacy, because there’s a book no flavor of Christianity I know of openly rejects while claiming to be Christian, even if they have adendums like the book of Mormon. The rules are defined.

They aren’t only not trying to live up to those rules and ideals, they aren’t only just paying them lip service, they are actively, jubilantly, and studiously undermining and working against the most belabored edicts of their belief system without end and calling that Christianity.

Cheering for the torture of the meek, demanding cruelty upon people from foreign lands and calling oneself Christian, ie Jesus of Nazareth as written in the New Testament, is like claiming to be an academic because you burn a book every morning and brag about how illiterate you are.

“What you have to know how to read and… read books instead of burning them to be an academic?” Actually yes.

Am I the only one who can conjure younger versions of myself in my head for a check-in in meditative exercises?

I’m 40 and 19 year old me’s only real shock is that I’ve let it go on this long. We’re still largely on the same page, and understand the nature of the few discrepancies, even if I don’t necessarily agree with myself.

Only one party is actively funded by our enemies

Incorrect, both parties take money from Wall Street. Only a tiny, tiny minority of the Democrats don’t, and those spoiler Democrats are hated by the DNC far more than the DNC opposes their esteemed Republican opposition.

If you refuse to see the capitalist oligarchs are the enemy that created the conditions for Trump, then nevermind and carry on, as there’s nothing that ever could convince you.

No, sadly. Soulless cash grab.

The Trump base will blame Obama/Biden/Clinton, I guarantee it.

It must be so freeing to live a life more divorced from logic or reality than an indoor dog.

Maybe eliminating natural selection was a mistake.

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Republicans have proven they’re willing to burn themselves alive, as long as their never ending list of enemies burn beside them and they get to watch.

Glad I went Emby.

This country was destroyed under Reagan. We needed a national security strategy against the capitalists back then and instead invited them into the government.

This is just the fire sale, the vultures picking the well rotted corpse clean. Reagan and Welch destroyed this place, don’t give Trump that much credit. He’s just an opportunist who saw profit in chaos.

The United States 1776-1980 - Died of thirst waiting for Promised Golden Showers of Prosperity that never came - Useful Idiots

Enjoy the high latency.

In case anyone doesn’t know,

Fascists start with the minorities within minorities, the smallest groups they can, to test the waters, get the smallest pushback, boil the societal frog, and normalize those people going away. It’s an easier and more manageable proposition for the Fascists to send LGBTQ to the gas chambers a letter at a time as the other letters hunch their heads hoping not to be noticed than have to fight a unified LGBTQ, for example.

It’s what the “First they came for the socialists” poem is about. If you don’t defend the lives of those unlike you, unless you have blonde hair, blue eyes, and tow every single ideological line of “normality,” they’ll get to you eventually(unless you’re very wealthy, they’ll get a pass as always no matter what, don’t worry), and as they force you on the train Tesla CyberSwastiBus, you’ll remember all the people you were fine with suffering the same fate when it wasnt you, no longer there to appeal to in solidarity to save your selfish, solely self-interested ass.

That’s what I hate about capitalism even before its inevitable end stage of fascism, its faustian appeal to the darkest part of our nature: “rational self-interest,” the rebranding and rehabbing of being a selfish antisocial fuck into somehow being virtuous. It’s the opposite. It is the very bedrock of being a shitty person and the underlying cause of most human suffering, "sure, but what’s in it for meeeeeeee?"

It boggles my mind how so many don’t/can’t/refuse to see how this foundational requirement of capitalism, the nurturing of selfishness as virtue and not profound character defect worthy of scorn, will always lead society to mass dehumanization of others. How else can you be comfortable eating a feast on a personal mega yacht while children are denied school lunches and human beings die under our freeways? “Well, I’m better than them, they’re beneath meeeeeeee after all so they deserve their suffering and I deserve all their portions.”

Maybe Saruman would be a better metaphor for the Neoliberals, but Saruman just seems too… competent.

"I affirm your identity! You’re free to be who you are without shame! As you die in a cardboard box under a freeway of exposure for failing to be exploited well enough, and as an intentional threat to the other poories to keep laboring for their corpo bribers. 🤷

Ooh, but here, have a ribbon! I hear they’re quite tasty when boiled."

They’re not the primary villain, those are the corpo Fascists, but they’re sure as shit the bumbling secondary antagonist. The Denethor to Sauron.

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Thank you! I try to, even though at the end of the day the best you can do is the show runner that signed off on it, as you’ll never really know who invented it in the writer’s room.

"Who I am is where I stand.

Where I stand is where I fall."

-Steven Moffat, Doctor Who

I have a lot of darkness in my head due to my upbringing. I’ll never get it out. That doesn’t stop me from being a good man, because who you are and what you’ll be remembered as isn’t your internal struggle, its what you chose to stand for in practice.

It is inevitable that capitalists will conquer their state, but with constant vigilance, for a time, capitalism can and is used as an engine to serve society, so long as it is heavily regulated and hobbled. The Nordic nations for example.

It’s when the capitalists begin to be allowed to influence their government, and convince the people THEY can live larger than their neighbors if it weren’t for all the social equity evil government enforces, capitalism’s signature siren call.

The Nordic countries still have free to roam policies. Capitalism here capturing their own regulators and being allowed to warp public opinion with blatant self serving lies through for profit media pulpits make some Americans eager to shoot other Americans.

I’m not for capitalism at all because it eventually leads here, to fascism, and eventually someone in power will be dumb or corrupt enough to let their guard down. But we let our capitalists conquer our government, as have several western nations. And here we are.