Latest Posts by ryu289 - Page 8

This doesn't automatically mean that it's MAGA republicans ruining people's mail in hopes of ruining Kamala ballots, but considering that it's MAGAts who's been saying that they're going to be doing this I think it's pretty much safe to say that it's them. (Source. Source.)

The website where you request your ballots from should update saying that they got your ballot. Otherwise you can call them. If all else fails you can just go there and ask. If they didn't then you can vote. If you did then you're good. (And I highly, highly suggest that you do these things!)

Bigenitalia vs Ambiguous Genitalia (re-upload)

Not sure if it'd get flagged for being a direct link, so here's a QR code scanner site just upload the QR code there and it'll spit out the direct link to the image.

Corporate greed

In today’s world, corporate greed is more than just a talking point—it’s a crisis that affects every aspect of our lives. From skyrocketing prices and stagnant wages to environmental destruction and political corruption, the insatiable hunger for profit at all costs has put everyday people at a severe disadvantage.

But how did we get here? And more importantly, what can we do about it?

The Never-Ending Pursuit of Profit

At its core, corporate greed is the prioritization of profits over people. Businesses are supposed to serve society by providing goods, services, and jobs. However, in the modern capitalist system, many corporations focus solely on maximizing shareholder wealth—often at the expense of workers, consumers, and the environment.

Consider the following:

Wage Suppression: While the cost of living continues to rise, wages have stagnated for decades. Meanwhile, CEOs and executives receive record-breaking salaries and bonuses.

Job Exploitation: Many corporations cut costs by outsourcing jobs, exploiting workers in developing countries, and using temporary or gig workers to avoid offering benefits.

Price Gouging: Pharmaceutical companies charge exorbitant prices for life-saving medication, oil companies inflate gas prices, and tech giants squeeze consumers with subscription-based models.

Environmental Destruction: From oil spills to deforestation, corporations destroy ecosystems in pursuit of short-term profits, leaving taxpayers to deal with the consequences.

The Role of Corporate Lobbying

One of the most alarming aspects of corporate greed is its influence on politics. Through lobbying, campaign donations, and political action committees (PACs), major corporations manipulate government policies to serve their interests. This results in:

Tax Loopholes: Many billion-dollar corporations pay little to no federal taxes while benefiting from public infrastructure and services.

Deregulation: Laws designed to protect workers, consumers, and the environment are often weakened or repealed due to corporate pressure.

Bailouts for the Rich: While small businesses struggle to survive, major corporations frequently receive government bailouts when their risky financial practices backfire.

The Impact on Everyday People

For the average citizen, corporate greed translates to a lower quality of life. Higher prices, job instability, and declining public services are just a few consequences of a system that prioritizes profits over people. It’s no surprise that wealth inequality continues to widen, with the richest 1% controlling more wealth than the bottom 90% combined.

Fighting Back Against Corporate Greed

While the power of big business may seem overwhelming, change is possible. Here are some ways individuals can push back:

Support Ethical Businesses: Choose companies that prioritize fair wages, sustainability, and ethical labor practices.

Advocate for Policy Changes: Support legislation that promotes corporate accountability, such as higher taxes on billionaires and stricter environmental regulations.

Boycott Greedy Corporations: When companies engage in unethical practices, collective action through boycotts can send a powerful message.

Educate and Organize: Awareness is key. By educating others and organizing grassroots movements, people can challenge corporate influence.

Final Thoughts

Corporate greed is not an unavoidable consequence of capitalism—it is a choice made by those in power. By demanding accountability, supporting ethical businesses, and pushing for systemic change, we can create an economy that works for everyone, not just the ultra-wealthy.

It’s time to put people over profits.

If I may add to the discussion, I think a big issue with online activism is that people are so concerned with looking like a good person that they don't understand the reasons why someone might do something that technically goes against leftists principles. It's so easy to judge someone for not boycotting certain establishments that are objectively bad (and I'm all for boycotting if possible don't get me wrong!) but people often seem to forget that not everyone has the means to boycott. Where I live, the only way I can get basic necessities is often through Amazon or other big retail chains. I'm not proud of it but I literally don't have a choice right now. Like you and a couple of the other anons have said, a big issue with online activism is that people are so concerned with doing things that they believe are the markers of a good person that they forget that part of being a good person means being open to conversations and understanding why people do or don't do things. And this includes the people they have deemed as "bad people."

Yes that is a good point! 'There is no ethical consumption under capitalism' is not an excuse to never even try to be ethical in your choices, but it's also not actually a progressive position to demonize people with no effort put into understanding their practical, structural realities.

No, “convenience” isn’t the problem

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in CHICAGO (Apr 17), Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Using Amazon, or Twitter, or Facebook, or Google, or Doordash, or Uber doesn't make you lazy. Platform capitalism isn't enshittifying because you made the wrong shopping choices.

Remember, the reason these corporations were able to capture such substantial market-share is that the capital markets saw them as a bet that they could lose money for years, drive out competition, capture their markets, and then raise prices and abuse their workers and suppliers without fear of reprisal. Investors were chasing monopoly power, that is, companies that are too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

The tactics that let a few startups into Big Tech are illegal under existing antitrust laws. It's illegal for large corporations to buy up smaller ones before they can grow to challenge their dominance. It's illegal for dominant companies to merge with each other. "Predatory pricing" (selling goods or services below cost to prevent competitors from entering the market, or to drive out existing competitors) is also illegal. It's illegal for a big business to use its power to bargain for preferential discounts from its suppliers. Large companies aren't allowed to collude to fix prices or payments.

But under successive administrations, from Jimmy Carter through to Donald Trump, corporations routinely broke these laws. They explicitly and implicitly colluded to keep those laws from being enforced, driving smaller businesses into the ground. Now, sociopaths are just as capable of starting small companies as they are of running monopolies, but that one store that's run by a colossal asshole isn't the threat to your wellbeing that, say, Walmart or Amazon is.

All of this took place against a backdrop of stagnating wages and skyrocketing housing, health, and education costs. In other words, even as the cost of operating a small business was going up (when Amazon gets a preferential discount from a key supplier, that supplier needs to make up the difference by gouging smaller, weaker retailers), Americans' disposable income was falling.

So long as the capital markets were willing to continue funding loss-making future monopolists, your neighbors were going to make the choice to shop "the wrong way." As small, local businesses lost those customers, the costs they had to charge to make up the difference would go up, making it harder and harder for you to afford to shop "the right way."

In other words: by allowing corporations to flout antimonopoly laws, we set the stage for monopolies. The fault lay with regulators and the corporate leaders and finance barons who captured them – not with "consumers" who made the wrong choices. What's more, as the biggest businesses' monopoly power grew, your ability to choose grew ever narrower: once every mom-and-pop restaurant in your area fires their delivery drivers and switches to Doordash, your choice to order delivery from a place that payrolls its drivers goes away.

Monopolists don't just have the advantage of nearly unlimited access to the capital markets – they also enjoy the easy coordination that comes from participating in a cartel. It's easy for five giant corporations to form conspiracies because five CEOs can fit around a single table, which means that some day, they will:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/18/cursed-are-the-sausagemakers/#how-the-parties-get-to-yes

By contrast, "consumers" are atomized – there are millions of us, we don't know each other, and we struggle to agree on a course of action and stick to it. For "consumers" to make a difference, we have to form institutions, like co-ops or buying clubs, or embark on coordinated campaigns, like boycotts. Both of these tactics have their place, but they are weak when compared to monopoly power.

Luckily, we're not just "consumers." We're also citizens who can exercise political power. That's hard work – but so is organizing a co-op or a boycott. The difference is, when we dog enforcers who wield the power of the state, and line up behind them when they start to do their jobs, we can make deep structural differences that go far beyond anything we can make happen as consumers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

We're not just "consumers" or "citizens" – we're also workers, and when workers come together in unions, they, too, can concentrate the diffuse, atomized power of the individual into a single, powerful entity that can hold the forces of capital in check:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all

And all of these things work together; when regulators do their jobs, they protect workers who are unionizing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

And strong labor power can force cartels to abandon their plans to rig the market so that every consumer choice makes them more powerful:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

And when consumers can choose better, local, more ethical businesses at competitive rates, those choices can make a difference:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/10/view-a-sku/

Antimonopoly policy is the foundation for all forms of people-power. The very instant corporations become too big to fail, jail or care is the instant that "voting with your wallet" becomes a waste of time.

Sure, choose that small local grocery, but everything on their shelves is going to come from the consumer packaged-goods duopoly of Procter and Gamble and Unilever. Sure, hunt down that local brand of potato chips that you love instead of P&G or Unilever's brand, but if they become successful, either P&G or Unilever will buy them out, and issue a press release trumpeting the purchase, saying "We bought out this beloved independent brand and added it to our portfolio because we know that consumers value choice."

If you're going to devote yourself to solving the collective action problem to make people-power work against corporations, spend your precious time wisely. As Zephyr Teachout writes in Break 'Em Up, don't miss the protest march outside the Amazon warehouse because you spent two hours driving around looking for an independent stationery so you could buy the markers and cardboard to make your anti-Amazon sign without shopping on Amazon:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/break-em-up/#break-em-up

When blame corporate power on "laziness," we buy into the corporations' own story about how they came to dominate our lives: we just prefer them. This is how Google explains away its 90% market-share in search: we just chose Google. But we didn't, not really – Google spends tens of billions of dollars every single year buying up the search-box on every website, phone, and operating system:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Blaming "laziness" for corporate dominance also buys into the monopolists' claim that the only way to have convenient, easy-to-use services is to cede power to them. Facebook claims it's literally impossible for you to carry on social relations with the people that matter to you without also letting them spy on you. When we criticize people for wanting to hang out online with the people they love, we send the message that they need to choose loneliness and isolation, or they will be complicit in monopoly.

The problem with Google isn't that it lets you find things. The problem with Facebook isn't that it lets you talk to your friends. The problem with Uber isn't that it gets you from one place to another without having to stand on a corner waving your arm in the air. The problem with Amazon isn't that it makes it easy to locate a wide variety of products. We should stop telling people that they're wrong to want these things, because a) these things are good; and b) these things can be separated from the monopoly power of these corporate bullies:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/08/divisibility/#technognosticism

Remember the Napster Wars? The music labels had screwed over musicians and fans. 80 percent of all recorded music wasn't offered for sale, and the labels cooked the books to make it effectively impossible for musicians to earn out their advances. Napster didn't solve all of that (though they did offer $15/user/month to the labels for a license to their catalogs), but there were many ways in which it was vastly superior to the system it replaced.

The record labels responded by suing tens of thousands of people, mostly kids, but also dead people and babies and lots of other people. They demanded an end to online anonymity and a system of universal surveillance. They wanted every online space to algorithmically monitor everything a user posted and delete anything that might be a copyright infringement.

These were the problems with the music cartel: they suppressed the availability of music, screwed over musicians, carried on a campaign of indiscriminate legal terror, and lobbied effectively for a system of ubiquitous, far-reaching digital surveillance and control:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes

You know what wasn't a problem with the record labels? The music. The music was fine. Great, even.

But some of the people who were outraged with the labels' outrageous actions decided the problem was the music. Their answer wasn't to merely demand better copyright laws or fairer treatment for musicians, but to demand that music fans stop listening to music from the labels. Somehow, they thought they could build a popular movement that you could only join by swearing off popular music.

That didn't work. It can't work. A popular movement that you can only join by boycotting popular music will always be unpopular. It's bad tactics.

When we blame "laziness" for tech monopolies, we send the message that our friends have to choose between life's joys and comforts, and a fair economic system that doesn't corrupt our politics, screw over workers, and destroy small, local businesses. This isn't true. It's a lie that monopolists tell to justify their abuse. When we repeat it, we do monopolists' work for them – and we chase away the people we need to recruit for the meaningful struggles to build worker power and political power.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/12/give-me-convenience/#or-give-me-death

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

the idea that restrooms, locker rooms, etc need to be single-sex spaces in order for women to be safe is patriarchy's way of signalling to men & boys that society doesn't expect them to behave themselves around women. it is directly antifeminist. it would be antifeminist even if trans people did not exist. a feminist society would demand that women should be safe in all spaces even when there are men there.

I hate the way our world is built around money.

I genuinely hate how our entire society is built around money. We don't see people as human anymore, we see them as assets or burdens. We are all alive and I firmly believe that:

Immigrants are human;

Trans people are human;

People of color are human;

Queer people are human;

Intersex people are human;

People of any religion or no religion are human;

Every single human deserves the right to Healthcare, food, shelter, clothing, education and BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS. Politicians see people as burdens, money or insignificant pawns in their game. This needs to stop. We all deserve to not only exist and live, but truly thrive. While the rich get richer, the rest of the world gets left behind. We are all equal, so we need to start fucking acting like it.

Jan 6, 2021 Flashback:

Kevin Greeson (pictured here relaxing at home) stormed the Capitol, armed with a taser. During the violent uprising, he accidentally tasered his testicles, suffered a heart attack & died.

Please don’t make fun of him because that would be nuts.

"Freedom seeds"?

These weirdos have the mental and emotional age of 12. These are little boys playing war and pretending to be cool, powerful men - with zero idea what it actually means to be that.

Performative feminism is a most annoying aspect of our times.

Whoop! There it is...!

"The question was posed, "Why do people continue supporting Trump no matter what he does?" A lady named Bev answered it this way:

“You all don't get it. I live in Trump country, in the Ozarks in southern Missouri, one of the last places where the KKK still has a relatively strong established presence.

They don't give a shit what he does. He's just something to rally around and hate liberals, that's it, period.

He absolutely realizes that and plays it up. They love it. He knows they love it.

The fact that people act like it's anything other than that proves to them that liberals are idiots, all the more reason for high fives all around.

If you keep getting caught up in "why do they not realize this problem" and "how can they still back Trump after this scandal," then you do not understand what the underlying motivating factor of his support is. It's fuck liberals, that's pretty much it.

Have you noticed he can do pretty much anything imaginable, and they'll explain some way that rationalizes it that makes zero logical sense?

Because they're not even keeping track of any coherent narrative, it's irrelevant. Fuck liberals is the only relevant thing.

Trust me; I know firsthand what I'm talking about.

That's why they just laugh at it all because you all don't even realize they truly don't give a fuck about whatever the conversation is about.

It's just a side mission story that doesn't matter anyway.

That's all just trivial details - the economy, health care, whatever.

Fuck liberals.

Look at the issue with not wearing the masks.

I can tell you what that's about. It's about exposing fear. They're playing chicken with nature, and whoever flinches just moved down their internal pecking order, one step closer to being a liberal.

You've got to understand the one core value that they hold above all others is hatred for what they consider weakness because that's what they believe strength is, hatred of weakness.

And I mean passionate, sadistic hatred.

And I'm not exaggerating. Believe me.

Sadistic, passionate hatred, and that's what proves they're strong, their passionate hatred for weakness.

Sometimes they will lump vulnerability in with weakness.

They do that because people tend to start humbling themselves when they're in some compromising or overwhelming circumstance, and to them, that's an obvious sign of weakness.

Kindness = weakness. Honesty = weakness.

Compromise = weakness.

They consider their very existence to be superior in every way to anyone who doesn't hate weakness as much as they do.

They consider liberals to be weak people that are inferior, almost a different species, and the fact that liberals are so weak is why they have to unite in large numbers, which they find disgusting, but it's that disgust that is a true expression of their natural superiority.

Go ahead and try to have a logical, rational conversation with them. Just keep in mind what I said here and be forewarned...!”

Trump official declaring ‘Anyone who preaches hate for America’ will be deported worried users: ‘They just skip the First Amendment.’

All their bad faith accusations of weaponizing government that were made towards the Biden administration were attempts to justify actual weaponizing of government for authoritarian purposes under Trump.

I am not remotely surprised by this assault on free speech, nor am I surprised that all those knee-jerk jerk right wingers, who cryied about aledged silencing of free speech online, are suddenly silent once it’s political convenient for them.

MSNBC.com

As he uses antisemitism claims to target visas, Rubio chats with influencer who praised Hitler

An interview with Michael Benz, who once wrote Hitler had “some decent points,” exposes the administration’s crackdown as a ruse.

😡

Oh.

We're at "traffic tickets are justification for disappearing people off the street and sending them to death camps with no due process" levels of fascism now.

Okay yeah we're like fucked, fucked.