Alternative for Germany has joined France’s National Rally and Reform U.K. in becoming the most popular party in its country, according to polls.
A poll Tuesday showed Alternative for Germany — which is under surveillance by the country’s intelligence services over suspected extremism — is now the most favored by voters. The survey by broadcaster RTL put the AfD at 26%, ahead of the ruling Christian Democrats at 24%.
This is a high watermark for the European far right, a once fringe movement whose virulently anti-immigration, anti-Islam and culture-war politics were shunned by the mainstream just a decade ago.
Today, these parties have developed deep ties with President Donald Trump and his Republican allies, who openly cite nationalists such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as inspirations on policy and tactics.
Billionaires control the polls, own the news, own the social media, and have foundations and think tanks pushing society to the right. It’s all manufactured and twisted. They use lobbying / corruption to ham string all democratically started socialist programs so they no longer work well and it turns people against them. Billionaires are parasites that slowly suck society dry. They shouldn’t exist.
Most importantly, they paint the liberals as the left option to pretend that left does not work.
Thanks Elon, for your financial support of Hitler acolytes worldwide. Also, get fucked you Boer-reject piece of shit
I wonder, how can people look at what Trump/MAGA has done to the US and think to themselves “I want THAT for my country”.
People are fed up with being broke and not able to afford the same things that they or their parents could afford even 20 years ago. Populists do not have to offer policies they can or event intend to implement so they can promise any old shit to the gullible who want change. Wrap that in a reassuring racist package: immigration is out of control, send back the small boats, etc. so that it doesn’t smell like communism (not that communism cant be racist) that people confuse even moderate socialist policies for due to decades of western propaganda.
Couple this with the Overton window being moved ever towards the right due to left and center left parties being captured by neoliberals who seek funding and patronage from the Rich, plus decades of the press putting pressure on any left wing policies by enforcing a double standard of left wing policies required to fully document how they will work and be funded, while right wing fantasy policies are waved through without any scrutiny from the majority of press.
Then the right deliberately break any essential service, under fund it and spend it elsewhere, making it time consuming and expensive to fix, leading them to point at their opponents being ineffective, and the press refuse to hold the right to account over this.
This has reduced any coupling between those left of the far right and the general population in terms of policies meeting the requirement. You can start to see why they are gaining ground.
This could help give some explanation of the election of Trump/MAGA, but 8 months into that election everyone outside can see that they just made all the problems worse. And when this rise was noted last year, I wouldn’t have asked that question because the people don’t have something to give an an honest response of what would really happen if such groups were elected to power (which these exact same problems happened the last time Trump was elected, but it’s happened now twice in a row with a safety bumper between these elections which would help dismiss any claim of it was a fluke/bad timing). Which comes back to my question, how can you look at Trump/MAGA and say “I want THAT for my country?”
We aren’t dealing with hypotheticals anymore, we are already seeing cause and effects.
I feel that in 50 years from now there will be documentaries about how the Russians won over Europe and the US by influencing voters and just straight up frauding right wing parties into the government.
I refuse to believe that many people are this stupid/brainwashed to fall for literal 1930’s Nazi propaganda.
Your comment presupposes that there will be some kind of back to normal in 50 years, which is unfortunately not going to be the case. Climate change accelerates, economic and political crisisl follows, and these kinds of populist movements are going to thrive in that kind of environment.
Climate change will not have stopped in 50 years, on the contrary.
IF there will be a free enough country to make this documentary
The documentary might be in Russian. Even Hitler had planned a museum to feature all the people he had exterminated; once you’ve won and everybody is dead, there’s no reason to hide it any more. Another example would be our (the United States) fascination with native american culture, now that it’s far too late to reverse that particular genocide.
But they do, even if Russia can flood the information space and all that. I have no doubts there.
Still, a lot of stupid people need to believe this crap.
I go about my day not believing that crap but others are seemingly open to this.
They don’t. But the wealthy, the corporations, etc, they do.
They do, the majority of voters are fucking illiterate idiots. It’s not always an evil plot by big business, reality is usually far more depressing
I think it’s both. With enough illiteracy, enough misinformation and corrupt media, enough evil corporations, and potential election interference, and there you go - far right movements driven by lack and entitilement and hate and greed. Malignent leadership manipulating others and the system to get what they want. Combine it with cost increases because of evil corporations and their clutch on politics and climate change inaction, and resulting cost increase on foods and other products due to major climate events and instability, and that’s where we’re at. It sucks because with all of our knowledge, our technology, perhaps things could’ve been way better. But malignant greedy leadership and the worst traits of humanity have given us this outcome.
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Racism and other kinds of bigotry mostly.
Maybe ask a Trump supporter?
They don’t,this shit reeks of right propaganda
Billionaires are people, too. Sorta.
Sigh
A Brit told me
I vote for whomever says they will get rid of the boat people
The Danes, or the Angles, or the Saxons? Or the Romans? Or the …
Far right parties are a product of stupidity and foreign money. The stupidity of the establishment parties in Europe ignoring the people’s will on immigration enabled the far right, and Putin’s Russia gave them the means to run with it.
These parties are here to stay unless the establishment parties take the Denmark approach and become more anti immigration.
These parties are here to stay unless the establishment parties take the Denmark approach and become more anti immigration.
This is exactly what has been happening in Germany (most notably with the CDU and SPD) and it’s not working. All that happens when these parties take on AfD talking point is that their voters no longer want to vote for them while the AfD’s positions get normalised in the mainstream.
What they actually should do is stop picking uninspiring and corrupt candidates and push for things that would actually benefit the working class (wealth tax, tackling the housing crisis, etc.) instead of funneling more wealth upwards. At the end of the day the AfD is strong because people are struggling to make ends meet and the AfD is using the racism that’s always been present in Germany to offer them an easy scapegoat.
It’s the wrong approach to take the talking points of AfD to begin with. They’re neo fascists, why would they try to copy them? Not only is that lazy, but it’s also shows that these establishment parties are out of touch with the populace. These far right parties are gaining ground because there’s no viable alternative to them on immigration. Establishment parties trying to compete with far right parties at their own game is a losing strategy, and it shows. If they want to win people over on immigration then they need to actually understand what people are concerned about and then actually take the time to provide a viable and pragmatic alternative for people to vote on.
I don’t think the issue is really immigration at all. It’s that working class people are being squeezed harder and harder and no party, including the AfD, seems to take it seriously. The AfD is just good at populism and pretending they have a solution by blaming it on immigration and selling themselves as less corrupt and incompetent than the others, while actually being just as bad or worse. If the CDU and SPD in particular hadn’t allowed things to get this bad while spending decades in power, the AfD’s populism wouldn’t have fallen on fertile ground.
And there is also an argument to be made that the media has dropped the ball by allowing the AfD on talkshows and debates without sufficiently pushing back and calling out their bullshit and thus allowing them to paint themselves as a legitimate alternative despite being fascists that are found to be at odds with the constitution (Grundgesetz) time and time again.
Also the AfD is probably the best out of all the parties at social media.
Can you link me to some credible sources on legitimate problems caused by immigration in Europe? I’m in the US and I don’t see the downside of immigration. Most of the folks angry about immigration here are just being sold a scapegoat.
Admittedly, we’re much more culturally diverse to begin with, harder to get to, and have quite a large base population so maybe I’m comparing apples and oranges.
I think it is a case of comparing apples to oranges. I’m saying this as a first gen immigrant from Iraq myself, I’m in the US but I have family in Europe (Finland, Sweden, and Germany), and it’s just a very different dynamic. The national narrative about immigration, the ways immigrants are treated by society, and the way government assists immigrants in Europe and the US are quite different. They also get different kinds of immigrants, which is also important. All these factors contribute to very different situations economically, politically, and socially.
But I think this is the wrong way to approach this topic in this context because what matters more in politics is perception. When you look at the polls of any European country with a large immigrant population, virtually all of them have a pretty big chunk of the population, usually ethnically native and working class, that are heavily anti-immigration. This implies that the big issue with immigration in Europe is integration and assimilation. Since the establishment parties over there outright ignore them entirely, they end up flocking to far right parties instead since they’re the only ones who want to place restrictions on immigration.
legitimate problems caused by immigration in Europe
Just my opinion, but: There are no systematic ones that can’t just as plausibly be explained by anti-immigrant stances of the locals. Yes, of course, immigration also means SOME people immigrating will be bad in one way or another, but statistically significantly not more or less than the amount of bad people born in the country. Most of the problems “with immigrants” arise from a mutual escalation of people not willing to integrate. In short, and without saying which comes first:
- immigrant does bad thing X
- anti-immigrant people point at X and claim it’s because they are immigrants
- some people will believe the accusations and behave more poorly towards immigrants
- some immigrants will turn the prejudice against them into a dislike / hatred of their host country
- immigrants do bad things
- rinse and repeat
Speaking for Germany, all of this is FAR outweighed by the richness that immigrants bring to our country. Germans - and I say that as a German - really needed (and still need) a lot of lessons in empathy and kind-heartedness - and we have more of that now than 50 years ago, thanks to not only evolution of society, but also thanks to immigrants from the mediterranean - Italians, Spanish, Greek and Turks. If Germany had no immigrants, I would leave this country in an instant.
people not willing to integrate
This is the only “issue” I can think of from my own experience in the US. I imagine some resentment can form if a country has a lot of what I’ll call “culture” for simplicity’s sake. An influx of people with different “culture” might feel like an attack on your own culture. I frankly don’t understand but that’s why I mentioned the base population of the US being large and diverse. Perhaps we’re already such a “melting pot”, at least in the densely populated cities and suburbs, and having so many pockets of cultures is just what I’m used to. I want to better understand but it still just sounds like ignorant fear of a different culture.
Hell, it’s a well established statistic, that many people pretend doesn’t exist, that criminality is lower among the immigrant population. Any population will have some bad apples, but the incoming population is thinning them out if anything.
if a country has a lot of what I’ll call “culture” for simplicity’s sake
The irony is that the racist people typically do not have any culture, they spend their days with faces glued to smartphones, trashtalk and being egoistic assholes. Where smartphones / social media are part of the root cause, and the rest (egoism, trash talking, being racist) come from the same character trait: lack of empathy.
I think there’s multiple ways it can happen. Sometimes, incoming cultures aim to be inviting and inclusive, and do what they can to become involved with the surrounding community. But other cultures really silo themselves and never speak to “the foreigners” - while continuing to take up more and more of the area. They speak their home language, don’t discuss the existing culture or even share their own. They don’t act like guests, just tenants - sometimes not realizing that thanks to refugee programs they’re often paying “guest rate”, not “tenant rate”.
However, that certainly isn’t always the case. I’d point to the Italian and Hispanic cultures in America as some that have become distinctly American. It’s harder for me to give examples of the “silos” since, by definition, you don’t see much of them; but sometimes during elections, church gatherings, or other census-related actions, you’re reminded they exist.
The thing that people ( not you of course) just do not understand, is that for a lot of western countries the birth rate is under 2. So every year the population has a larger part of old people.
Our systems for retirement, government, social programs, etc only really work when more young healthy people are added.
So we actually really need young immigrants to basically keep the boat floating.
If the boat requires an infinitely growing population then it’s bound to sink sooner or later.
That’s true, can’t have something infinite (population growth) on a finite planet. It could possibly work with expansion to space and other planets.
There’s that, too. But I hope we can find a way to keep the population size stable at most, because the world already has too many humans…
Man it’s the 1920s all over again!
This is so depressing. I remember 10 years ago seeing how the world was changing, I was full of hope for the future, we were slowly becoming more socially accepting of minorities and it seemed to be slightly getting better. Now the progress didn’t stop, it fucking reversed and shit is so much worse than it was. This makes me really sad.
The people pretending they cared about the gays and the minorities ignored people’s basic human needs.
That’s how we got here.
Who got all the new wealth from increased productivity post 1980? The gays and minorities?
The billionaires who are scapegoating gays and minorities just like they almost always do.
I don’t think they’re saying helping gays and minorities was the problem. I think probably more that rich and powerful for a while learned they could get votes while enacting predatory economic policies by marketing social issues where the government doesn’t actually do a ton there but put minority groups into marketing campaigns for what public programs there are out there and advertise non-governmental things minorities can seek. So minorities and LGBQT were really good marketing for politicians and the rich while they were pushing privatization, lower taxes, austerity, higher surveillance/police state, etc
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Now the progress didn’t stop, it fucking reversed
It didn’t reverse itself. Huge amounts of effort and organization went into that reversal.
We are speedrunning robber-barrons through WW-II in one shot this time. What a ride. Can I get off, please?
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“My wage-slaves are getting a bit too comfortable. Here’s a bunch of money. Go fuck with them.”
- Sociopathic Oligarchs
That’s why it’s a called a “reaction”
Who the fuck looks at the US right now and thinks “I want that?”
Fascists
This is EXACTLY what leftists have been trying to warn liberals about. People everywhere are struggling under late stage capitalism. Centrists liberal parties like Labour, CDU/PSD, Renaissance, and PO are telling everyone that everything is great and the ship will right out soon. Meanwhile far right parties acknowledge that everything is fucked and they promise to punish “those responsibile” for it (they of course are referring to social minorities instead of the wealthy capitalists that are plundering our societies.
The current status quo parties if Europe either need to pivot their platforms to radical change and clamping down on the capital class whome literally everyone hates or they are simply paving the way for fascist takeovers.
What happens instead is that the established parties decide they can win the voters back if they adopt far-right policies. We get extra-shitty governance and they still lose voters. It’s a lose-lose situation but they’re committed.
Yes, and every election season we will see liberals decry any leftist movement and demand that now is the time to rally behind feckless "electable " neoliberal politicans that everyone hates and will drive away more voters, and then blame everyone who warned them that they would lose. The establishment parties will blame “extremest messaging” or some such nonsense and then push further right the next time around and the leftmost fringe of the party will be expelled.
And this all is thanks to those very same far-right figureheads pushing that every form of leftism is Stalinism, will immediately cause mass starvations, censorship, white genocide, mandatory homosexuality, etc.; so no “sane” people dares to implement anything that is deemed “too far-left”.
Then the far-right figureheads push even harder on what is “too far-left”.
Then the far-right figureheads slowly redefine what far-right is. The nazis slowly become cartoon villains, who ran on the program of “killing Jews for fun”, thus if you bring up any reason to justify your hatred, then you’re a savior, a messiah, the moderate between leftist lunacy and far-right genocide for fun.
Then the far-right figureheads play lip service to various issues. They’ll claim to protect your free speech from the far-left. They claim to defend your workplace. They claim to stand for the flag. And most of all, they claim to be moderates on every issue, but with caveats more obvious to those who are more well-versed in politics. Their free speech issue is mostly about hate speech for some reason, but still want to protect children to some degree (I personally wouldn’t be surprised if Nigel Farage only dropped the age verification on hate speech, then issued a full-on porn ban). They talk ill of unions for going “too far” and celebrating “hard workers” and those within the “hustle culture”. They will cry “communism” if they have to buy something else instead of that beloved “foreign brand”.
(This all gave me an inspiration for an article, I just need to find a good outlet.)
If that were true then wouldn’t leftists be winning in the polls? Why would Late Stage suffering cause a shift to the right? Makes no sense.
You anti-liberal crowd seem like precisely the reason this kind of thing is happening. You’re like a pipeline for people to go from socialists to Trump supporters and anarchists.
Maybe you should look at how governments have reacted to right wing movements vs left wing movements over the past century and you’ll answer your own question. The US wasn’t paying communists to terrorize fascist groups in Italy and Greece, nor were they suddenly forgiving if war crimes to incorporate communist leaders into their societies.
There was a just a news story posted this week about the German court ruling that a communist book club could legally be disbanded amd broken up by the state, yet that same government does nothing to Stop AFD
Angry people
More like idiots
Idiots are allowed to be angry.
Idiotic angry people.
Vladimir Putin.
Maybe if the left wing party that got in for the first time in 15 years actually behaved remotely like they should, this would not be happening in the UK
All Kier Starmer has managed to accomplish is vindicating the idiots that say “both sides are the same” and fuelling Reform’s populism.
His government’s current policy focus areas make Tony fucking Blair look like a socialist by comparison—and he earned the fucking red-tie Tory assessment of his policies.
vindicating the idiots that say “both sides are the same”
When a “left wing” party is still far right, the people who complain have a point. Yes, there is a difference between extreme right and far right, but in the absence of any meaningful leftist options, people will gravitate toward those they hope will implement actual change, even if the change is worse than every other alternative. This most often tends to be those who want to pull the world even further to the right.
Yeah. I naively thought that finally there might be some change now the fucking Tories have imploded, but no.
What a monumental turdpile.
Same thing is happening in Australia. It’s controlled opposition. The real leftists have been progressively out-capitaled from the center-left parties. Now their majority are corporate whore “centrist” neoliberals that continue to screw the workers, just slower than the center-right party, which is now a borderline fascist party.
I’m still waiting for people to realise that we live in corporate dictatorships with the illusion of democracy; you can vote for whoever you want, but the oligarch-financed candidates are statistically guaranteed to win a majority 90+% of the time, coz capitalism. The major difference is how much lube they apply before they fuck you.
I’m still waiting for people to realise that we live in corporate dictatorships with the illusion of democracy; you can vote for whoever you want, but the oligarch-financed candidates are statistically guaranteed to win a majority 90+% of the time, coz capitalism.
People having this realization and solidarity amongst the common folk are the only way to we have a hope of fighting this pile of shit back.
It’s still nowhere near a guarantee of a win, and it’s made monumentally more difficult by the oligarchs plotting to divide us up (using the politicians and social media platforms they own) but it’s the only chance we have.
Spot on
Labour has been a joke of a party for the past 3 decades. The only reason they are in power right now is that the Tories actually managed to completely destroy the UK. Labour and the Tories are going to go the way of the Whigs the nezt election and will be replaced by Reform UK and Corbyn’s new leftist party.
All these leftists become conservatives when their wealth is threatened.
This is bewildering. As an American citizen who has no idea how the actual fuck we wound up with another Trump presidency, all I have to say is, if you live in any other country and think the answer is to import this bullshit into your own country, I have no sympathy for you.
Social media plays a big role in this. People have been inoculated with a state of mind that allows this kind of ideas to succeed.
It’s not as simple as “Europeans are also voting for Trump-like parties”. You have multi-party system in Europe and the far-right parties are mostly anti establishment movements. People are mad at lack of action from the governments when it comes to housing, climate, crime, immigration and social services issues. They are tired of both left and right wing parties so they voting for the alternatives now. It’s not exactly some anti-intellectual, extreme conservative, anti-democratic movements like MAGA. Yes, it’s still bad but most people support EU and democracy. While MAGA is a purely fascist movement trying to regain their dominant position over the minorities in EU it’s more about frustration with the ruling class.
As an American, thank you for explaining this. It’s still not great because it echoes what happened here. We are also stuck in a duopoly that was slowly being cranked to the right over decades. A lot of people were initially drawn to Trump because of his ideas of “draining the swamp” and sounding anti-establishment. I think the duopoly and the sense of anti-establishment under a capitalist economy (that turned into hypercapitalism) is where fascism really dug it’s claws in and when things really started to accelerate. I have hope that this will result in something better after whatever happens happens, but I’m deeply worried about my family, my friends, my self with whatever comes next. I don’t want people to die and suffer but that’s already happening and has been happening. I feel powerless and it’s awful.
Everyone everywhere is worried now. I really hope EU as a whole will survive and guard basic human rights (at least internally) but who knows?
I’m not sure how corrupt the politicians are in your country, but they are here. We’ve had laws repealed one by one so politicians can get bought off like by oil companies, health insurance, war profiteers, housing investment companies (renting out homes to people instead of people owning), etc. That seems to be a major issue for us in why no progress was made in terms of climate change and other issues too. Although our democrats made progress on social issues, which honestly democrats won’t lose much with some policies and laws for some social progress, they’re still protecting corporate interests because they want their slice. I’m not sure if there’s a good future for us or not, but I’ve been reading that getting involved in one’s community and grassroots helps. Best of luck to you and yours from across the pond.
Nah, fuck that. I plan to blow my head off anyway. Might as well stick an axe in some nazi as well.
As an American citizen who has no idea how the actual fuck we wound up with another Trump presidency,
I can help you, here.
We skipped the primary and coronated Liz Cheney as our party leader.
election was rigged like 3 times, plus Dems wont do anything, they are afraid of being labed the riggers by the conservative. at least the old guard is very complicit with the gop(they benefit from his tax cuts, and many are Dinos themselves)
That’s the thing. We have a foresight Americans don’t necessarily have and we’re still making a mess. It’s an even more damming reflection of our society.
You’d think what’s going on in what used to be the US (now a crater of burning shit) would have been a lesson for the rest of you.
Do Not Vote Con If You Don’t Want Life To Suck.
Stupid euros always talking mad shit about hep they’re better than us and turn around and do the same dumb shit
It’s going to be worse than you have. Not the same, living there, seeing the things: Europe is on the verge of going the hardest right wing way again, trumpism will look like amateur far-right compared to what is about to go down here.
Idk. Were already just blackbagging brown and homeless people off the street for concentration camps, queers are probably next. Unless you skip straight to the killing part
I also want to add on how big our military, police forces, and prison systems are. It seems like the imperial boomerang is finally crashing back into it’s citizens. Add ontop of that our technology, Silicon Valley and all it’s tech moguls, and our lack of privacy. I don’t know how Europe compares in terms of tech and privacy though, but I know we are around the top for military, police, and prisons. Yay - America is so exceptional in brutality and imprisonment off of our taxes… :(
Lol welcome to Lemmy tho
While it didnt kill the right wing populist parties, it did stall many of their efforts to get their chosen leaders into office. We shall see how the all shakes out.
What disgusts (but doesn’t surpise) me is that the media have almost completely ignored the fact that each Europen fascist party is exactly following the Moscow line, with the possible exception of the Italians, who claim to support Ukraine. Those parties are fronts operated by a hostile power, and should not only be shut down, but their leaders sent to prison for treason.
Instead: crickets.
yeah, and when you point this out, even with evidence of connections with the media and russian oligarchs and russian money going to media personalities they just yell about how the west’s favorite scapegoat blah blah
like do I think russia created a right wing populist movement in the west? no, however they are the reason they are all toeing the same line on issues important to them, and repeating, word for word, the same propaganda
Holy hell, what a comment section. I’m seeing Americans calling out Europeans for being all talk about what America is supposed to do, several people lamenting impending doom, and more blame targeting the ultra wealthy.
Our future needs to be Solarpunk and have class mobility. Do something for your community this week. The answers lie with the people that think differently than you. De-propagandize your neighbor by giving them a shared enemy. Nothing binds people together like conflict. While we’re at it, encourage boxing matches between government officials. Mabne then we’ll keep younger, highly motivated individuals in office.
Britain: Conservative + Labour starts Online Safty Act, Reform tops polls shocked pikachu face
Labour: We were sure continuing purging our own left base and adopting all Tory policies would make us look good! Fucking traitors the lot of them.
WTF is happening in the world rn? Why are all the right wingers taking control? I thought it was just the US going through a crazy-stupid phase
Billionaires learned how to use the world wide web as an AI powered disinformation network
perfectly written.
Social media. Muskrat, Zucc, Thiel, etc. are high on the fumes of the AI hype, and want that sweet AI money, from the surveillance state using AI.
Well right now in the UK we voted for the supposed
left, centre,centre right wing party (The UK has the same 2 party issue as the US more or less) and they reacted by being even more right wing than the right wing we just got rid who recently also just imploded their popularity and now we’re stuck with the far right party next election because UK politics is such a caste based exclusive club that no one on the left or even real centre has enough political or monetary capital to form an opposition.and want that sweet AI money
actually i think rich people don’t really personally profit from extra money. They have already more money than they could ever spend to fulfill personal wishes. in that sense, the money is not “sweet”.
the reason they’re hoarding so extreme levels of wealth is because they believe in “greatness”, in being a part of something greater and bringing the world progress, one way or another. that’s why “techno-optimism” is such a common theme among them. “mars settlement” might go in a similar direction, though that one has more reasons (jobs programs, mostly). it’s more for a desire for greatness (you could call it imperialism, but without the bloodshed) more than a desire for money, i think.
the reason they’re hoarding so extreme levels of wealth is because they believe in “greatness”
They only believe in the “greatness” of themselves. Which is expressed monitarily.
Their entire self worth is based on the size of their bank accounts, on what they “could do” with their money.
Instead of, you know, what they’re actually doing with their money: nothing.
They hoard it to feel special. They could literally give away billions to the right places to fix shit immediately and still be billionaires. But they don’t.
Despite that very literally leading to them being worshipped. Which would be more greatness for them then they have now. And more greatness for the world. And it ain’t happening.
Because. They’re all convinced they’re the smartest people ever, and not big idiots that never learned the basic social benefits of sharing.
“Greatness” isn’t found on top of a pile of money. It’s found at the bottom once it’s been spent. That’s how people and the economy actually benefit from it. By the velocity in which it changes hands. Which so far, is near 0% for these billionaires seeking “greatness.”
It’s embarissing, if anything, to see them so incapable of achieving their goals of greatness simply because they’re too insecure about having anyone else that isn’t them spend their money. Especially when it comes to actually using it to benefiting the world instead of their egos.
It’s more that they use the accumulated wealth as a leaderboard score to show off to other rich people.
But the reality is that economic power is power, and a healthy society must limit the amount of power any individual can accrue.
I think you’ll get a lot of different answers depending on who you ask, and i think liberalism and allowing other people their own opinion / interpretation of things is important. Yet here’s my take:
- There was a gross mis-interpretation of reality around the 2000s when people believed that we could lay down all violence and gross behavior and enter a “perfect, soft world” which was understood as an absence of sexism and nationalism, mostly. However, these are instincts so deeply rooted in people that you can’t just “get them out” in any way, even if you try to create a social movement around “calling out” men who show sexist behavior. What happens instead is that these suppressed groups seek their own expression, and you end up with far-right populism.
I like the idea of an AI apocalypse
I don’t want to love on this planet anymore
We can either blame the western political system for it or some other agents interested in making it fail…
Asimov’s second foundation spoilers
spoiler
As with the second foundation, it was strange to see psicohistory predicting so precisely the future, here it is very strange to see all western democracies fail at the same time
The Foundation has been out for 75 years. I think we’re past the time limit needed for spoilers
Imo we are never past the spoilers… someone may be doing its first steps into it and deserves to have the full experience.
Idk man, while it’s possible that this is russian influence, I think it’s beating around the bush and facing the fact that people are capable of being terrible all on their own* (talking about the manipulative people in politics, not the gullible citizens)
Russia and china are only using failures in western policies against us. They don’t create them. It’s up to our nations to resolve those tension spots so they cannot be used against us.
The Russian argument is understandable because it’s what our governments point to as the origin of their failures. It allows them to keep pointing at that “outside interference”, invest in surveillance while not investing in what the subjects used by the interference reveal about the real wants of the population are.
Russia certainly is no friend of democracy and hatred towards the Putin regime is healthy but to fight it does take more than just saying a third of your citizenship is dumb and brainwashed, you have to remedy what they use against us.
This is true. But at the same time, a THIRD of our population ACTUALLY IS dumb and brainwashed. How the fuck do you fix that?
That’s true as far as it goes, but breaking the chain of Russian (and other hostile nation) influence on our politics is still the most direct way of dealng with the fascist problem. They’re puppets and we must cut the strings.
I think this is the beginning of Foundation’s Edge, tho. Second Foundation book deals with the First Foundation looking for the planet where that homes the Second and revolves around Arkady Darell
You’re confused because you’re existing in a censorship bubble.
it’s not just censorship. people have fundamentally different instincts, and that leads them to see different behavior as “normal” or acceptable.
We’re all in hell.
Nah, the human species is finally being honest. This is what we are. We are shit.
We have and can be better. There is no excuse.
No, we can’t. It’s time we accept the truth. Humans are, at their core, evil, hateful, selfish creatures.
Idk I don’t think it’s so black and white - that’s a cognitive distortion. There are good/better people who work hard to help people. Or people who are kind and uplifting to others around them even if it’s not their job. What we’re seeing now is malignant greedy people taking advantage of multiple collapses: our governments, the sixth extinction, climate change, etc.
I’ve spent time thinking and learning about the worst parts of humans, and I’m no expert, but the good, the bad, the ugly, and all the shades of gray inbetween, are all things that humans have used to survive. Just some people, whether by nurture or nature or culture, skew to the worser traits and some to the better traits. I guess I’m telling you all of this because there are good people who aren’t evil at their core, there are good people who make life worth living and that should give you hope and maybe something to hang onto during these awful times.
What we’re seeing now is malignant greedy people taking advantage of multiple collapses: our governments, the sixth extinction, climate change, etc
And literally nobody is stopping them. Why is that? It’s because every human is a malignant greedy person.
I’ll leave the optimism to others. I’ve officially seen enough. We are beyond redemption.
So why are you commenting? Why not fuck off to your cave of misery?
I have, but you goddam humans have infested the entire planet.
I’m sorry that this is how you feel. There are good people fighting fascism right now. All is not lost yet.
Well, maybe both of you are right, actually. We all suck so much and have been putting off a lot of responsibility for such a long time, and now it’s coming back to roost. Kinda nuts to think about, that it works that way.
