Glad I could help.

Based on the average age of Lemmy, I’ll go out on a limb and say I’m probably older than you.

What you call “informed positions” is simply giving up on seeing the reality over the propaganda. Your cynicism doesn’t allow you to separate the theory of capitalism from the reality of capitalism. You’re essentially no different than those people who say that anything except the current situation is essentially “socialism”, which by definition must be bad. But just because corporations have taken over capitalism, doesn’t mean there isn’t a fight to be had to try to change that.

I’m very close to 50 years old. I’ve got plenty of my own life experience that I don’t need any of yours thanks. If you want to give up, go right ahead. Some of us believe is a system where capitalism is contained by strong government regulations and social safety nets. Why do we believe this, because there’s plenty of European countries that already do this. Just because North America is completely bought out by corporations doesn’t mean that’s just what capitalism is.

Go be a sad sack defeatist on your own time.

Capitalism is inherently parasitic

I fundamentally disagree with that.

Venture Capitalism is parasitic. But Capitalism itself is not at all. At it’s heart, if we continue with the landlord analogy, let’s say that you are renting a house from the OP’s Aunt. She’s paying the building insurance. She’s paying the maintenance, (or in some good old fashioned cases doing it themselves). She’s dealing with the paperwork involved in owning a home. Hell, in some cases you don’t even have to mow your own lawn. So of course she’s charging you rent. It’s not a charity.

But if she’s a private owner, than your rent stays with her. She uses what she needs to maintain the building and…yes…makes a profit that then gets spent in the local economy.

The only time there’s an issue is when your rent is being sent to a corporation that may not even be in the same country as you, and that money leaves your local economy for good.

To use an anecdotal example, I’ve worked in my time for two different furniture stores in my town. One was a chain, and one was/is a family run operation from the beginning. And yes…that family is wildly successful; I’m not guessing millionaires, but close to it. And I don’t begrudge them at all for that. Because it’s family owned, they aren’t forced to only care about a stock price or about profit. My boss would randomly come up to me, sometimes multiple times a year, clap me on the back and say “You’re doing a good job, I’m going to add a buck an hour to your wage.”

Because they can. Because for all intents and purposes, you’ve got a better chance to be treated like a human being when a corporation isn’t in the way.

The chain furniture store would only give out raises when forced to by government mandated cost of living increases, because anything more would cause the stock price to go down.

The heart of capitalism is my first example. The reality of capitalism is my second unfortunately. But that’s not the fault of capitalism itself, it’s the lack of government oversight protecting us from predatory corporations.

No.

I of course can’t speak for anyone except myself, but for me, what your aunt is doing is what essentially capitalism is all about.

Its when those landlords get replaced by venture capital corporations and reits that it becomes a problem.

In your aunts case, the rent money stays local, contributes back to the local economy, etc…

In the case of venture capital and corporate ownership, the only goal is to increase a stock price for a corporation. None of that money gets returned to the local economy except for possibly hiring a local property management firm to handle things on the ground for them.

When capitalism remains about people, all of good. When corporations take the reins of ownership so their profit becomes the sole motive is when things go bad.

Economic chaos for a little while, and then everyone would just go on with their lives. Economically it would matter of course; America became the richest power after the first world war when all of Europe needed loans to fight their “great war”, causing the greatest transfer of wealth the world had ever seen.

But culturally, I’m betting the number of people who would give a shit if the United States stopped bossing everybody around is far less than they think it is.

The american sense of importance is strongest mostly in their own heads.

This is exactly the right answer.

I think it’s a complicated question. I say yes, but with caveats.

He needs to be prosecuted in order to keep the letter of the law running. You can’t just say “you can’t kill anyone unless the rest of us don’t like him.” Laws should be about absolutism.

However the sentencing does not have to be absolute. Find him guilty (because technically he is). Then give him a suspended sentence because of extenuating circumstances.

I haven’t tried the 60s yet, but I’ve heard good things about Westlake. My entire reading world changed when I discovered the original hard-boiled works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Moved my youtube habits away from doom and gloom news channels and instead to history documentaries and old episodes of Best of the Worst.

Similar to that, spend more time on Pluto TV/Roku/Tubi watching terrible low budget sci-fi and old comfort episodes of Quantum Leap and TNG.

Thought so. Just making sure.

Supporting ActivityPub doesn’t excuse being owned and operated by META.

Will Bsky eventually shit itself like Twitter did? Sure, maybe. That seems to be the normal path nowadays. And when it does, I’ve still got my Masto account that I try to keep active as well. But at the very least, Bsky is a different company. I can have a bsky account without being dragged into an entire META ecosystem designed to put their chosen content in front of my eyes.

Even at it’s worst, the fact that Bsky is it’s own thing and not owned by a mega corporation puts it automatically about Threads, regardless of ActivityPub.

Just to be the nihilist in the room, I honestly think that the point of no return for humanity occurred the moment we stepped down from the trees and started to evolve. And I’m not actually kidding.

I’m not an evolutionary expert, so I’m more than likely talking out of my ass, but I was an Archaeology Major with a focus on the Bronze Age Collapse and what I can tell you is this…

From a certain perspective, the same evolutionary traits that brought our species to this point, are the very same traits that will keep us from moving forward past it. Selfishness, resource hording, greed, the urge to continually expand at the expense of others. Fear of “others” outside of ones own community; all these things in some form were beneficial to growing from hunter gatherers to urban/agricultural societies. We needed organisation to build cities, so we created monarchies. We needed ways to control the growing population, so we created a fear of a deity.

We needed a reason to not allow too many people in to our society so that we didn’t waste resources, so we created borders and the concept of “others” that aren’t like us. Now, all of that has to get binned if we have any hope of getting past this point because the only way forward is as single planet, not petty nation states. But every single thing that brought us to this point prevents that from happening. It’s ingrained in our very DNA, so to speak.

Point to a group that cannot defend itself and people will vote in your favor

“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” – Lyndon Johnson.

Still ultimately Conservative policy to this day.

Even the big guy needs middle-management sometimes.

Yes. It’s ONLY supposed to be used when you find yourself leaping from life to life. Striving to put right what once went wrong. And hoping each time that your next leap will be the leap home.

I don’t make the rules. I just enforce them.

Similarly related, I remember reading The Hunt for Red October and enjoying it. But I can’t decide if I actually enjoyed it, or if I’m transposing a memory from my enjoyment of the film to my enjoyment of the book. I’m afraid to re-read it and find out, because I haven’t been a fan of much else that he’s written so I suspect I know the answer.

I couldn’t remember which general it was, so I had to swallow my pride and ask ChatGPT.

The general who famously called for documentation of concentration camps during their liberation was General Dwight D. Eisenhower. When U.S. forces liberated the Ohrdruf concentration camp, a subcamp of Buchenwald, on April 4, 1945, Eisenhower recognized the significance of documenting the atrocities. He anticipated that future generations might doubt the extent of Nazi crimes, so he ordered extensive photographic and film documentation of the camp’s conditions.

Eisenhower even invited journalists and members of Congress to visit the camps to ensure that eyewitness accounts would back up the documentation. He felt it was crucial to make the evidence indisputable, as he feared that without such documentation, people might one day deny or downplay the horrors of the Holocaust.

NATO will be fine. They’ll just have to up their game a bit militarily. If America wants to be insular and wrap a flag of isolationism around them, it’ll hurt in the short term, but after four years of being more independent of Americas tit, its more than likely the US that will find itself less relevant globally.

Even before this, there was already rumblings, not just in China, but elsewhere, about ditching the american dollar standard and returning to the gold standard. That’s just going to gain momentum as soon as Trump starts trying to wave his mushroom around.

They don’t. It was never their country to begin with, clearly.

The majority of the U.S. has been racist, bigoted, misogynists from the beginning. Hell, the entire electoral college system that just fucked everyone over is a compromise that was put into place because a bunch of rich white landowners in the Antebellum south couldn’t stand the idea of freed black men’s votes having as much power as theirs. So they immediately rigged the system to keep them in control of who gets power because you better believe no black man was ever going to be an elector.

That is who your country is. There was a brief period from the 60s to the 80s where it became declasse to be an asshole, and so they mostly shut up during that time when they were in public, and then went home and took out their frustration by beating their wives and kids.

Then along came the modern republican party, who began to tear down that cloak of respectability, and it emboldened all of those wife beating shit-heads to say “Hey…we can be assholes again…go us.”

This is your America. It always has been. I’m sorry if that hurts. I really am. But right now I’m also goddamned angry at your country on behalf of my country and all the others that have to be caught in the blast.

A largely forgotten show from the late 90s called “Seven Days”.