100%. Let’s not let partisanship distract us from the omni-presence of the military industrial complex and the authoritarian bent of everyone who’s been in power in the US over the last several decades. Dems will tinker around the edges to make it more palatable, but there’s still: black sites, torture, drone strikes, unjustified wars, installing of puppet governments in sovereign nations, abuse of the commons for private profit and an absolute hunger for every scrape of your data to monitor and manipulate you no matter who is in the White House.
If I have to choose between voting for pro-corporate neoliberalism or fascism 2.0, I’ll vote the former, but that’s basically just asking which speed you’d like quality of life to erode for the average person. I’d really like a couple more options on the ballot please.
Nit: Quality of life for average Germans went up, not down, once they brought back slavery and started pillaging other countries. If that's the metric we're using to decide what form of government we want, then all bets are off; ethics and morality play no part.
Yes, I would not like my own prosperity to come at the cost of others’ suffering (where “others” here means all of humanity). I understand hard choices must sometimes be made but I think our technology has progressed to the point that we can honestly provide a good quality of life for the vast majority of human beings globally if we were able to overcome old modes of thinking and actually set ourselves to that problem.
But it seems there are certain types of people or that under certain circumstances have grown to have this twisted need for “all”, instead of “just enough”. I don’t really understand that mindset as I haven’t experienced it myself. If my friends and family had UBI that allowed us all a good quality of life, I would split my time between spending time with them, reading and endlessly tinkering with new technology and adjacent creative fields, and be perfectly satisfied with that life. I crave the occasional toy, but simply don’t understand this constant ache for material accumulation that some people have. It seems to hurt them as much as it does everyone else around them.
Just from reading your comment, I think I have a very similar view to yours about the meaning of life, what constitutes a life well lived, and what we should spend our time on. Like you, I'm ridiculously uninterested in toys, especially toys that are bought to show status (as opposed to ones you're just interested in). Like you, I'm very satisfied with a life of tinkering and exploring code / art / music / writing that makes me a full person with a sense of accomplishment.
As someone who came from the extremely far left (with an anarchist bent), I just want to respond to this, though:
>> it seems there are certain types of people or that under certain circumstances have grown to have this twisted need for “all”, instead of “just enough”.
My observation has been that the desire for all, or at least more, is inherent to all people. You may be happy with a UBI, but the great complaint is wealth inequality.
I look around and find myself pretty well-off, with easy access to goods and services my father struggled for, and which my grandfather could never have imagined. I look around and see people of my own well-off technical elite upper-middle-class touting stuff like Maoism, because America allegedly has worse wealth inequality than China did in the 1970s. And logically I have to ask: Are these people so obsessed with keeping up with the Joneses that they can't see what they have?
Greed comes in different forms, right? There's this amazing line in Dostoevsky's "Devils": Why is it that all these desperate socialists and communists are so incredibly miserly, acquisitive, and proprietorial? In fact, the more socialist someone is, the further he's gone in that direction, the stronger his proprietorial instinct. Why is it?"
Okay, so imagine you live a life with 100x the material wealth of your grandfather, like me, but you still are in the middle 40-60% of the country in terms of wealth. You'll never own a private jet, you'll never party on a private island. The question is: Are you happy with yourself and your life? Can you see how much prosperity you've achieved and be proud of it? Or do you spend your time worrying that someone else has more than you, that it's unfair, that the system is rigged against you, etc.
Maybe this is because I come from an immigrant family mindset, but, prosperity and self-reliance are so much more important to me than trying to compare my life to what anyone else has.
Personally, I'd be happy enough in a prison cell or on my death bed, if I had a pen and paper to write on. So I'm okay with other people having luxuries I don't have. I count each day as an amazing blessing if I can wake up, find work, get laid, eat a good meal, watch a good Netflix show, get stoned and go to bed with my lover. Every single one.
I never for a moment thought that Elon or Bezos or any of them were happy. Their toys always seem to rot, their possessions don't intrigue me because they're clearly miserable.
In large bore: Those "certain types of people" you mention exist on both the Left and the Right - they will find a way to blame anyone who has something they don't have. That's the genesis of all the nasty politics we see. I'm not advocating for having less or having nothing or anything like that. I'm just saying, a small amount of appreciation (historically) for what you have now goes a long way toward letting people be happy and chill instead of angry and aggrieved. And someone will always have more unless you're the King of AI or King of Logistics or King of Twitter. So, we lead more modest lives, but lives are all finite, and we have happiness that they can't possibly achieve.
Which Christ is he trying to summon? Actual man-of-the-people Jesus from the bible, or the corrupted American-style supply-side Jesus of the prosperity gospel?
Obviously not the former. That guy wanted his followers to give their wealth and possessions to the poor, feed the hungry, care for the sick and elderly, forgive debts and treat foreigners and aliens with respect and dignity. To practice empathy of all things. Like some kind of beta male Marxist soyboy cuck.
Yep. Same thing happened in Germany. Hitler initially gained the support of the business community who saw a right wing ally and thought he would just mobilize his power against Labor Rights on their behalf, but also assumed he could be controlled by them long term. They were wrong.
Both are true. The underlying oppressive, lonely, pro-bullying culture creates the tension. The proliferation of high lethality weapons makes it more likely that tension will eventually release in the form of a mass tragedy.
Improvement in either area would be a net positive for society. Improvement in both areas is ideal but solving proliferation seems a lot more straightforward than fixing the generally miserable society problem.
I think Hashimoto has the right idea with Ghostty. If you have the financial / time freedom (and the spousal support) to tinker with a passion project, that seems like a great way to spend your time and skills without commercial pressures contributing to burnout.
I always like Neal Stephenson’s approach with his Sci-Fi novels too. Most of them have a central conceit based around a topic he wanted to learn more about (linguistics, nanotech, cryptography, etc…), so in essence writing the novel was just an excuse to obsess about that topic for a while.
A fun corollary to this is the various “food” products that exist only for the camera to consume. Most of the ice cream you’ve seen in movies is actually mashed potatoes since ice cream won’t survive under the hot lights of a movie set. Most of the milk you’ve seen in pictures of cereal is actually glue, etc…
Not wanting to retrain myself on ortho is the main reason I went for the Dygma Raise over other ergos. It’s been pretty fantastic with some nice switches and custom PBT keycaps but I would spend another princely sum for a proper low profile edition.
If I have to choose between voting for pro-corporate neoliberalism or fascism 2.0, I’ll vote the former, but that’s basically just asking which speed you’d like quality of life to erode for the average person. I’d really like a couple more options on the ballot please.