this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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A Boring Dystopia

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This is actually an older news story, and it does appear as though she recovered from this before her death.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14389544

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

the system loves cruelty

criminalizing poverty and brutalizing criminals is what spins the wheels of capitalism

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Our fault for not being born into rich families, I guess? :\

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Look the law is the law and police have to enforce the law. Except for their friends and family or city officials. Or if they just don't feel like enforcing the law. But other than that the law is the law!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

neoliberalism and late stage capitalism in its essence

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Just chiming in, she was arrested in 2017 and spent two nights in jail before being released by a judge, her charges were dropped and she received donations and support from the local community for her new living arrangements.

No idea what happened to her after that.

Also unclear why she was in this financial situation to begin with, there are several housing and medical care programs from both state and federal that could have covered this $500 monthly expense.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

As conservatives applaud...

Conservatism is a fucking plague of oppression, misery and death that targets the most vulnerable first. It needs to be eradicated and innoculated against.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Animals will fucking eat you.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Because they are hungry not because they are evil

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

decommodify housing already. wtf is wrong with people.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

...How does that work? Who pays for the lumber, cement, electrical, plumbing, etc?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

When you decommodify a thing the state takes a role to ensure the good or service is provided to all. You can have a mixed system with private and public construction. But as long as there is a robust public housing sector, prices for all houses will be much lower than in the current system where we have scarcity.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I read something recently analyzing what tends to happen when there's tons of artificially cheap public housing. Market forces determine housing prices regardless of government interference, so when the govt rules by decree that their public housing will be cheaper, the price differential doesn't go away, it just changes form. And more importantly, it changes hands. The price difference changes form from money into power, and it changes hands from the landlord into the govt agency or official in charge of determining who gets to live there and benefit from the lower cost. Make sense?

I don't disagree that housing costs are out of control. I think everyone is missing the point though, and the cause. It isn't mean rich people being evil bastards charging people too much. Right now what we are seeing is the natural result of decades of exponential economic growth. Real estate is an asset like any other with prices strongly positively correlated with other asset classes. If everything is growing exponentially like equities, of course real estate is going to grow along with them. I don't know what the solution is, but it certainly isn't anything suggested in this thread.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

So instead of having people spend 60% of their income on housing we will have some slightly annoyed people who aren't in the neighborhood they want to be in, spending <20% of their income on housing. Sounds like an improvement to me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

No, all you're doing is shifting power from the big bad mean rich landlord into the hands of the government agency or agent in charge. How do you not understand that? No matter what there's going to be an asshole with too much power/wealth.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Move to the bottom of a ditch.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Ahh, nice, cordial Lemmy interaction in the morning

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Lemmy has the most death threats per user of any social media I've ever used. It's kind of crazy. I guess that's why user numbers keep trending down. Monthly active users are down 21% on July last year.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Yeah I have to say the political environment here is getting more and more exhausting as time goes on. Lemmy is developing a 4chan-esque reputation that will keep it from ever really taking off.

Kind of a bummer.

“Lemmy is politically hostile”

receives downvotes, insults, and death theats

Yeah…..

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago

You don't even know what a threat is.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

true, at least she wouldn't be in jail for the crime of not being able to work with 93

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

True. Go move then. Or any other non capitalist country.

No? Maybe those are worse than capitalism and we should try to fix it instead of calling everyone terrorists? Ok then.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

nah, corporations are literally evil, as in no morals evil

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Fire is also no morals evil. Corporations are tools. Dangerous but powerful tools. You use them poorly and you end up with corporations murdering union leaders and poisoning communities. You don't use them at all and you end up with breadlines and authoritarianism.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

nah, fire is just the propagation of exothermic reactions.

Corporations require intent, they are designed to literally strip any moral consideration from their actions.

PS: about that breadlines and authoritarianism, the US has had plenty of breadlines, and still does to this day, also authoritarians love corporations, after all corporations are inherently authoritarian.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Corporations don't do moral consideration by their nature, just like fire. You can say it was "by design" for corporations and coincidence for fire, but that is a distinction without difference. Irrelevant for the argument.

And funnily enough, having many authoritarians in a system surprisingly results in much less authoritarian system than having just one. That is why the 3 branches of government are split and it is why I don't know of any true democracy that is not capitalistic. The authoritarians keep each other in check.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

you do realize that corporations aren't some law of nature? corporations are a social construct in the most literal meaning of the phrase.

secondly, you must think the HRE must have been some free paradise by your understanding, also I don't know of any fascist system that that wasn't capitalist, but I do know plenty of pre-capitalist democratic societies

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Again, distinction without a difference.

And you may want a refresher on your ancient democracies ;) Which one did not have a separate class of landowners (owning the only relevant means of production back then)? Also, just comparing agrarian societies to modern economic systems is childish. I am much better of living under "tyrannical capitalists" today than in any of those societies.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I would wager to argue that one being, entirely a concept only existing in human thinking. The other being an exothermic reaction following the laws of nature is quite a distinction here.

unless you are going to concede that we could just trust bust fire, can i sue fire for the damages on my house? what exactly is the fiscal return on the primary product of fire?

as for:

Also, just comparing agrarian societies to modern economic systems is childish. I am much better of living under “tyrannical capitalists” today than in any of those societies.

You confuse the achievements of modernism with capitalism, it wasn't capitalism the stopped famines in most of the world, it was a crazed Jewish-German nationalist with the backing of a local monarch

also, most of the Greek democracies had all not enslaved male citizens enfranchised, with the woman's vote in most the world being a consequence of socialist campaigning

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I would wager to argue that one being, entirely a concept only existing in human thinking. The other being an exothermic reaction following the laws of nature is quite a distinction here.

unless you are going to concede that we could just trust bust fire, can i sue fire for the damages on my house? what exactly is the fiscal return on the primary product of fire?

What are you even talking about?

You confuse the achievements of modernism with capitalism

You confuse using a hands crank with operating a nuclear powerplant. It is not about what created the modern industrial society. It is about whether an elected committee would be able to run it and average people be able to oversee it. Which they wouldn't. People that dedicate their entire lives to studying management and economics are barely able to.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What are you even talking about?

ok, really, REALLY simply put:

Fire, is generally an exothermic reaction, straight up chemistry/physics forces, there is nothing you can do that will change these functions.

a Corporation is NOT based on any natural laws, a Corporation does not exist outside the cognitive, it is not a real thing, it is an idea, there is no corporate matter in the universe.

in other words, Corporations, unlike fire, can be whatever we want them to be.

because corporations can be anything, anything bad they do is an Inherent moral question, and unironically you defend corporations with the idea of "just following orders"

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

You can redefine the word corporation just as you can redefine the word fire.

But corporations are groups of people (and some other stuff). They way they behave is not governed by what is written in a law-book or dictionary, but by the complex interactions of people and environments.

You can try to regulate them with laws like you can try regulate a fire by building a fireplace, but that control is always going to be far from perfect.

Of course, that certainly does not mean you shouldn't try, you must try just like with fire. But you need to be smart about it. It becomes more difficult as the corporations and the economy becomes larger.

There are ways to control forest fires, but the most effective is often a counterintuitive one. Control burns. You set even more stuff on fire. Capitalism is in a way a similar technique. You allow some resources to be wasted by the wealthy but the result of complex interactions between people is economic growth and better living standards even for the common people. Or you mess it up and the fire gets bigger, its not easy to regulate corporations.

Communism is in my opinion like a fireplace. It may work really well if you keep the system small and simple. But it falls apart as you add scale and complexity.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

there is a lot of waffling about there, all for you to admit that you think "i was just following orders" was a valid excuse for the holocaust.

and then the idiotic "Communism is like a fire place", you may think your comparisons sagely and wise, but they only serve to show how little you actually know, or have thought about any of this, for example, like I said before, do not equate capitalism with the advances of modernity, the standard of living started to improve a long time before capitalism was a thing, ironically capitalism strives to reduce the standard of living.

PS: it's very easy to legislate corporations, that's why they hate the EU so much.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I think you need to re-read the comment a few times because I have no idea who was talking about taking orders or holocaust.

As for my comparison, I made it as simplifies as I am possibly able to yet you still very obviously don't understand if you think I am talking about advances of modernity.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Ahe logic of corporations being some non-moral entities, like fire, is the same logic that the Nazis used at the Nuremberg trials when they uttered the famous line of just following orders. The idea being that they were not responsible for the shit they did, as it was just a function of how the Nazis worked.

And yes, it is perfectly apt to call out flaws in your argument by using other, well known examples of the same theory being applied.

As for your comparison, I have pointed out that it's shit because corporations aren't some inherent force of nature and are entirely dictated both by society though the legislative process, and by the people committing the actions.

Fire exists outside human preview, no human "created" fire, fire has always been a thing because it's a natural force, meanwhile, Corporations didn't exist until English and Dutch traders pooled money and resources in the 1600s

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Omg, you are so hung up on fire being natural phenomena. Fine, replace fire with nuclear rods. They are man made, they are dangerous. You can make them not radioactive but then they are useless and arguably no longer nuclear rods.

And who said the individuals in a corporation should enjoy some sort of immunity for following orders (or even giving them)? If employees break the law, prosecute them. Stop injecting nonsense into the conversation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Omg, you are so hung up on fire being natural phenomena

ya, one would think that in terms of morality, one being entirely a construct of humans, and the other being a natural phenomenon, there is a bit of a difference to be had

Fine, replace fire with nuclear rods. They are man made, they are dangerous.

again, radiation is a natural force, the nuclear rod doesn't do anything by its self. now one CAN talk about the uses of said nuclear rod, and THAT has moral implications, you know like how a bomb is amoral, but the army using it is very much morally culpable (unless of course you think the German army of 1933-1945 isn't evil), because both armies and corporations are the same thing, a human construct.

And who said the individuals in a corporation should enjoy some sort of immunity for following orders (or even giving them)?

so the Nazis weren't the problem, just the individuals, ok.

If employees break the law, prosecute them. Stop injecting nonsense into the conversation.

if you don't dump this toxic sludge in the middle of this town, your children will starve (yes, this is a thing that really happened), material circumstances exist, and any corporation not leveraging these material circumstances is lying or bankrupt (hence corporations are evil)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

unless of course you think the German army of 1933-1945 isn't evil

You do realize you are the one implying the Nazi soldiers aren't evil, because the individual soldiers were threatened into serving:

if you don't dump this toxic sludge in the middle of this town, your children will starve (yes, this is a thing that really happened), material circumstances exist,

So are people who are threatened into evil evil themselves? Make up your mind.

Either way, it is not relevant for my argument.

The way a group of individuals pursuing their goals interact with each other is a law of nature just as much as radiation. We just call a specific type of such group a corporation, just like we call a specific arrangement of fissile material a nuclear fuel rod.

Sure, you can "make" a corporation not be greedy by for example turning it into a non-profit. But you can't do it without making unintentional undesirable changes, namely stopping them from being efficient in creating value. Just like you can "make" a nuclear fuel rod less radioactive, but not without damaging its usefulness as fuel. Because you can't change the laws of how individual actions in a group create a complex system.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You do realize you are the one implying the Nazi soldiers aren’t evil, because the individual soldiers were threatened into serving

that only works if you have some hard-line stance against seeing the world as anything but purely individualistic, in fact no I propose the opposite, even those who did not themselves commit the gassings at Auschwitz were guilty of these killings, because, turns out after years and years of research, No man is an island unto himself.

The way a group of individuals pursuing their goals interact with each other is a law of nature just as much as radiation

but it isn't, to assume as such is to assert your ignorance on such a profound scale, not just in the legal sense but also in the Historical and Societal. How we organize, and interact as a society is completely and totally alien to those who lived but three generations before us, to claim it is a natural constant on the level of radioactive decay or exothermic reactions is beyond delusional.

Fundamentally, you can't comprehend why a corporation is a moral entity because you don't understand the difference between a concept and a rock.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

How we organize, and interact as a society is completely and totally alien to those who lived but three generations before us, to claim it is a natural constant on the level of radioactive decay or exothermic reactions is beyond delusional.

It is your reading comprehension that is woefully lacking I am afraid. Repeatedly refusing to understand what I am saying in favor of your own interpretation. Let me try one last time to explain.

Imagine you have two particles interacting with each other through a collision. This is governed by Newtons laws. Add one more particle and it is the same. However, add 10^24 more particles and we are no longer talking about Newtons laws, but about laws of thermodynamics. In a sense, the laws of thermodynamics are not real, the particles are still governed by Newtons laws. They are just a result of statistical approximations, a human construct if you will. But you cannot change these laws, because they are the results of said Newtons laws.

In the same way, it is possible to change a Persons behavior, by modifying the environment the live in. This can include laws, law enforcement, taxes and many other things.

However, the behavior of a corporation is a statistical result of Persons comprising it. You can not change it in any other way than to change behavior of People. The (statistical) laws of how behavior of many individuals combine into a complex system, such as a corporation is what is unchangeable. These are the laws of nature.

Let us take your example of an army. What is an army? In a simplified view, it is an organization where individuals are armed, trained, organized into units with hierarchical structure in order to execute combat and other operations as ordered by national leadership. As a concept, the US army and the German army of said era have no meaningful difference in the form of organization they are.

The two meaningful differences are:

  1. The orders the armies received
  2. The individuals they were comprised of. Of course, some individuals such as high ranking officers have greater impact on the organization than foot soldiers, but they all do have impact. Their willingness to follow orders is what comprises the morality of the army.

So you can't turn the evil army of Germany into the righteous army of the Allies by changing what an army is. You have to either replace the orders it follows or the individuals that comprise it or both.

You can also stop the German army from being evil by having it not arm its members with weapons and instead train with musical instruments, but what you have then is not an army, but a marching band.

Equally, a corporations behavior is partly dictated by the laws it operates under and whether and how the People comprising it follow said laws.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

like I said, you can not comprehend the most fundamental difference between an idea/concept and a literal rock

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Well, you are a lost cause. Have a nice day

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

no, but you have shown you need to have a lack of brains to be a Libertarian

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

🤣 You are a clown 🤡 Me Libertarian 🤣