Conservatives are the people outside of the last frame encouraging the cops to step more on the neck region.

116 points
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I like that this also illustrates how pointless a million extra layers of boxes are for improving anyone’s life.

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20 points

It also does not illustrate what motivates a billionaire. It just makes their behaviour seem totally irrational which does not do you any favours.

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15 points

It is irrational but the same sort of irrational everyone is. Monkey need to survive winter so monkey stocks up on food/resources. Monkies never needed a ceiling for this behavior as there was never enough food. Now you have apes with a billion winters worth of stockpile yet that voice in their heads is still as loud as ever.

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6 points

No, I think you’re mistaken. I don’t think they feel that way at all. I think billionaires keep going because they are competitive. They want to win! And they often lose unfathomable amounts of money in the process, which they don’t care about. Survival brain does not shrug off huge losses so casually.

The other reason they keep going is because they want power. They’re used to being in charge and they hate when others have power over them. They’re subject to all kinds of scrutiny and they’re afraid when political power is leveraged against them. So they do what comes natural to them: try to leverage what they have for more power (and more wealth, which brings more power with it).

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2 points
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It’s a mix of ‘losing touch with value if you have lots’ and validated ‘more = feel good’ and competitive behavior.

In short, irrational.

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33 points

I really really hate the original version of this meme. No one uses equality, equity, and justice to mean the things the meme implies >:|

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11 points

What do you mean no one uses those terms that way?

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43 points

Not in this meme, but in the original. It implies that equality is not a good thing because surely the people calling for it haven’t taken into account that everyone is different and has different needs. It shows equity as being the same situation but tailored for everyone’s needs, and justice as being the same situation but with whatever created the inequality in the first place as having been removed.

My issue is that people don’t use these words in this way, the people calling for equality always want to provide according to peoples needs, and to remove the things causing inequality.

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8 points

I hear ya. I feel ya. 👍❤️

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4 points

I think it depends a lot on the people using the words. People who don’t believe that the systematized slavery as practiced in the US produced long-lasting generational effects, for example, might say that treating people equally moving forward is best. Under that belief system, everyone starts on ~even footing and gets the same opportunities, so actually it’s less fair to make special cases for folks!

In my view those folks are starting from a deeply flawed premise (and usually one they’ve arrived at in order to justify the worldview they already hold), so their conclusions are worthless. But I think they’d meet the criteria of advocating for equality and against equity, and sincerely mean it. It’s not hypothetical either, I’ve met people like this - depressingly many, in fact.

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4 points

That’s a good point. What do you think better words to use would be?

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33 points

I get the thought, but capitalism is the fence, the reason people need boxes just to watch the game in the first place.

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27 points

I’d draw the man with the million boxes using just the one to see over the fence.

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19 points

He’s blue shirt guy, who didn’t even need one to see over it.

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Curiously in Economics 101 circa 1985, there was a whole section on wealth disparity, featuring a graph with a diagonal line (perfect distribution), and the plotted chart that bowed underneath that line, showing how much extra wealth the rich have over the poor. When the area between those two lines gets too large, it leads to all the shit we hate about capitalism: suffering, regulatory capture, eventually state failure and civil war (followed by famine and pestilence).

The point of the section was don’t let this happen. And the state was supposed to do anything necessary to preserve a low disparity, or a pretty even distribution.

And by a pretty even distribution something like the richest people having 100x the average wealth, and the poorest having 1/100 the average wealth, so there’s a significant amount of latitude.

These days, the top three richest have more money than the bottom 160 million poorest in the US. So we are well beyond the civil-war and failing state points.

But then the state is failing and civil war may be imminent.

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4 points

Econ 101 is designed to obfuscate the real issues. Even talking about specific wealth distribution ratios is falling for the misframing of the issues that Econ 101 wants to lead people into with the pie metaphor. In the capitalist firm, the employer holds 100% of the property rights for the produced outputs and liabilities for the used-up inputs while workers qua employees get 0% of that. The entire division of the pie metaphor in Econ 101 is based around hiding this fact

@196

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2 points

I think your definition of “we” is what’s holding this back. They did not have “we” in mind when making precaution.

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I guess, then, we’re soon going to see if a we emerges, or if the new order is able to dispose of the potential wes one them at a time.

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