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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Not to mention, I spend way less time mindlessly browsing lemmy—Reddit was like a compulsion. To the point that, when I knew I was leaving July, I was actually getting worried about my ability to do so. I never want to feel that way about another app. I get on lemmy, I browse around for a bit, but I don’t feel the utter need to keep scrolling. Some stuff interests me, some doesn’t…but the stuff that doesn’t is usually relevant to someone in my life. So I send it to them, and sometimes these are people I don’t typically talk to regularly.

    All in all, lemmy has been a net positive in my life. I still get the app I can scroll when I’m looking to kill time, I can still write about stuff I care about, I can interact with other people…it’s the perfect balance for me. I don’t need that “everything all the time” shit. In fact, I’ve been trying to pull away from that entirely baseless desire in my life, which is nothing but a capitalist mindset. We don’t need everything. I don’t want to think I want everything.









  • But raising taxes for the richest is a small band aid on a massively flawed system. It’d be like getting a second, even smaller bucket to bail water out of the titanic. After it’s broken in half.

    There are so many incredibly serious problems that higher taxes for the wealthy wouldn’t fix. Liberals tend to cling to this option because it worked back in the 20th century. But capitalism has kept getting more and more “streamlined,” fucking over the working class more and more. Because the concept of endless growth has continued through multiple decades of massive changes to the game that only favored the wealthy, changes to the tax code being one that happened so long ago that it’s an entirely different concept at this point. Outsourcing, vertical integration, the explosion of invasive advertising, data mining, the explosion of privatization, the infestation of private money dictating policy, the infestation of private interests writing policy…this is a small list of the most visible things that have become so entrenched that a wealth tax would almost be nothing.

    That money would get funneled right back into their pockets, even if they somehow let a wealth tax bill through—yeah, they LET a bill through. As you said, a massive stumbling block that only goes to show how deep this problem is.




  • Exactly. Until we put either the heaviest lid on capitalism (never going to happen) or upend the system entirely, UBI will “drive inflation,” meaning we’ll still make the same (or probably somehow less) at our jobs while the UBI money literally just keeps everything at the same affordability. There is no world in which business doesn’t just go after that money. We saw very recently, with the flimsiest of excuses, capitalists will claim “inflation” while pocketing record profits. They’ll do the exact same if UBI is implemented without some massive changes to capitalism.

    Burn it all down. Anyone that still has hopes for fixes that maintain the capitalist system are fooling themselves. We have no other options at this point. It’s either we do it now, or wait until capitalism and the devastating effects of climate change force our hand. At least if we do it now, at our own discretion, we might be able to throw the emergency-emergency brakes on climate change. Otherwise, companies and the capitalists that run them will absolutely watch us all fry from their self-sustaining pod homes that are built in the upper atmosphere to keep the temperature bearable and to stay above the devastating weather events. And they’ll do it without thinking twice.


  • It’s the way history is taught in the US. We gloss over any wrong-doing by US leaders, whitewash American history while discussing pretty openly the failings of other states and forms of government…US educated children are (and I mean this word…literally) LITERALLY brainwashed into thinking that things like the vague concept of “fascism” existing only in Germany in the 30s-40s. If it’s not actual swastikas and red flags on every street corner with Jews being rounded up and killed by the millions…then it can’t be fascism.

    Our education system is severely lacking in a lot of ways, but not knowing how to put history in proper context while explaining how everything that’s happened has led to today and the exact conditions we are in now is one of its gravest failures.

    Not to mention, painting capitalism—a system that breeds people to viciously live in spite of others—as infallible and the final and only answer. That’s another horrible heavy dose of indoctrination that is just treated as a given.



  • Since changing from Reddit to Lemmy, I’m absolutely pulling out my phone to browse mindlessly far less. And I’m back to reading articles in full.

    I’m not sure even what it is about Reddit that made the app much more addictive. BecauseI was all third party since I was on Reddit, so I didn’t get the “recommended” Bullshit. Maybe it was the really specifically (self) tailored endless feed whereas with Lemmy I’m browsing all instances, a bunch of weird shit pops up that when an article I’m actually interested in comes across, I’m all in.

    But I was also never on social media besides Reddit, so I wasn’t filling a void? I dunno