As a planet, we have to address this issue of Sociopathic Oligarchs.

• Address the corrosive effects of concentrated wealth by organizing labor into an equitable society ready to defend itself against imperial aggression

• Don’t get called a Tankie on the internet

You gotta pick one.

We can’t just do it in our country, or they will set up shop somewhere else, and abuse us from a distance.

I mean, we can just do it in our country. And then we can support our peers abroad in their own efforts to do it in their countries. And this is what we’d call a Worker’s International.

But… eventually, we’d have to come into conflict with the armed agents of capital. And we’d have to fight them, with many of use dying in the struggle. And if we did this kind of conflict, we’d benefit from some kind of mobile artillery system capable of both shielding us from small arms fire and responding with explosive ordinance.

And oops, now we’re Tankies.

I don’t see how that happens, when nearly anyone can be turned by a billion dollar bribe.

Anyone can be turned, but not everyone can be turned. That’s the whole prestige of capitalism in the modern era. You get people on board by promising them that they’ll be rich one day, too. And if you string enough people along for long enough, you can extract their labor from the economy with a promise of future comfort and economic security nearly indefinitely.

Or, at least until the people you’re stringing along exceed the volume of resources at your disposal. Then you need to thin the herd a bit or risk sharing the wealth.

So its Socialism or Barbarism. But there’s no ending where we all just get to be billionaires.

“It used to be that people would get rich enough to affect their own nation… .” When? Where? There has never been a world where borders are a real thing that insulates one state from another (I assume you mean state, “nation” as the imaginary common identity makes even less sense). This is not a matter of a few individuals making this system function poorly, the purpose of this system is to generate wealth for a privileged few.

European imperialism/settler-colonialism and the capitalism that emerged through it has always functioned this way. It was funded by individuals with systemic privilege that afforded exceptional wealth and was realized through the exploitation of poor Europeans disadvantaged in those societies and the genocide of indigenous peoples all over the world.Thousands and thousands of nations were targeted for genocide by people who would never even step foot on the same continent as them. Wealth concentration may have improved the conditions for settlers in some places, but that wasn’t for the betterment of the state or nation or whatever you have imagined here. Workers and farmers with relatively high material security and wealth were allowed that level of power because it maintained a racialized and gendered hierarchy that was necessary to effectively carry out the violent extraction of wealth for the most privileged in society. That was in no way universal; there hasn’t been centuries of civil recognition and labour rights movements because most people flourished under this system.

There was no break in how this society was organised that allowed these exceptionally naughty billionaires to exist, that amount of wealth concentration is not new and is only possible through a system that devalues life.

I wonder if anyone else has made the observation that a global revolution is necessary to prevent capitalism from killing as much as it desires… 🤔

I think I understand this position, such that you don’t want people focusing on removing the oligarchs without also dismantling the machine that makes them.

But the machine doesn’t have to crush orphans. It gives you a pat on the head and hands you a cookie each time you do crush an orphan but it has other settings. They aren’t getting punished for not exploiting the system, they just don’t get as much of a reward as they could. No one gets to say “I had no choice but to crush that 99th orphan, so I could get that 99th cookie.” You could’ve stopped at 90, or 50, or 1.

They are exploiting a broken machine, to the detriment of others, for their own benefit. That is nothing but greed.

Eh, remember humans invented capitalism.

The problem is that our brains were designed for eating berries in a cave, not driving industrialized processes at global scale.

Our range of empathy extends roughly to our line of sight. When people in our social circle are suffering in front of us, most of us will try to do something for them. But people that are far away that get affected by our actions exist only in the logical part of our brains and don’t evoke an emotional response.

the world will be fine but we may not

live and let live

if we play our cards right we’ll be fine

Not the same as it ever was by a longshot. It is very much worse than it ever was, because the engagement to profit has been weaponized and dictates how the entirety of our global civilization fundamentally works.

It is most certainly not the same as it has historically been.

Except now the level of wealth, influence, and power of a few has reached new levels accelerating the erosion of our planet in a fraction of the time.

I’m curious which of their stuff you don’t like; Drew is one of the few people I subscribe to on youtube. They’re fairly funny, they don’t upload that often, and they seem to be genuine in terms of only making content when they think they’ve got something entertaining, interesting, or important. Even in the sillier videos, the deeper messaging is usually something related to exposing dark patterns.