I’m sure their private shareholders are absolutely thrilled with slave labor making them a few extra cents per share.

It’s insane what we allow people to do to people in the name of “just business” profiteering.

CEOs of the offenders at the time, and anyone who signed off on this, should go to prison. Instead, at most (and likely nothing at all), their companies will receive a fine far less than what they saved using slave labor, which means they’ll keep doing similar things.

Welp…

Rome always falls in the end.

Entropy always wins sooner or later.

The Roman Empire fell to corruption and decadence, and telling various groups whatever pretty lies they want to hear, rather than uncomfortable but necessary truths of our terminal capitalism driven social, economic, and environmental collapse falls firmly under that umbrella.

The first step to staving off such a collapse would be mass recognition of the problem, and since no one with power and few without are even willing to entertain that reality, collapse it is.

The quest for RECKLESS growth/metastasis is quite literally ushering in a new dark age of glorified ignorance.

This is just capitalism. NBC wants to give the ignorant right what they want to hear to grow their profits for their private shareholders. Nothing wrong with indulging the profit motive, amirite? /s

This isn’t being done because of the fires of fascist hatred, though it will assist the fascists. No, this is collapse by the detached, sociopathic ice of unapologetic, insatiable greed, our society’s absolute core value which is every bit as destructive as hate, and historically far more effective at accomplishing and maintaining that destruction generationally. A fascist will murder you, but a capitalist will keep you, your children, and your children’s children in subservient subsistence, and they don’t even care to know the demographics of their victims.

Money far beyond your material needs is power.

Power to alter entire governments and manipulate your own regulators, power to control others, the basis of grotesque corporate culture, it is a means, not an end.

Some use that power to buy news outlets and turn people into their ideological zombies, some use that power to build dynasties aka “foundations” out of vanity, and some use their power to “win” old grudges.

Bibi has sought power in the form of political office to do the last one. Allowing individuals to hold so much uniltateral power, be it in society warping levels of capital or political office without sufficient checks, is the mistake.

That’s what I have come to call the Paradox of Power. The ones most inclined and driven to seek power at any cost are almost always the last ones that should have it, and almost never have benevolent intent for that power, from a school bully who becomes a cop to a nepo baby who doesn’t like regulations on the family business becoming a Senator.

In his warped mind, Bibi fought for power to win a holy war, and that’s what he’s been doing. In his mind, he is chosen by God to secure the promised land from Godless animals. Religion sucks, whether one worships at the alter of Yahweh in his case, or Mammon in the capitalist’s case.

It’s a scary concept to be sure. It does make me wonder, however how it wasnt triggered when the Earth was still highly geologically active with volcanoes constantly spewing the Earth’s contents into the atmosphere.

If that didn’t make it occur, what prevented it? If it did occur, then it was clearly a temporary state that Earth has some mechanism to mitigate to return to something resembling its current state on a massive enough timeframe. Interesting stuff.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC251830/#:~:text=Oxidation of elemental sulfur by Sulfolobus acidocaldarius%2C an autotroph which,essentially quantitatively to sulfuric acid.

These single celled organisms literally take in elemental sulfur gas and excretes sulfuric acid.

I think it’s the height of arrogance to believe that an ever evolving, ever changing chain of complex life that has existed for we estimate 3,700,000,000 years can be truly done in by one of those creatures that has only been here for about 200,000 years, and has only developed the technology to play recklessly with the environment at scale for about 200 years. As I said before, we aren’t even the first macro-cancer to evolve from it that then dares to threaten the whole organism.

There have been catastrophic events in that time from within and mostly without that make our hydrogen bombs we’re so proud of seem relatively cute. Maybe you’re right. Maybe there is a specific pedal we’re pushing on that is a secret kill move that no massive asteroid collision or geological event could ever trigger in its wake, but I also think you have to look at the record of what life on Earth has endured. This bowl has hosted a lot of fragile little species of dependent little fish like us that came and went, but the bowl is as of yet undefeated if winning means life goes on.

I give Earth more credit than that. The Asteroid that killed the dinosaurs cut the earth off from photosynthetic solar radiation for 15 years and filled our atmosphere with toxic dust and ash, life suffered greatly, but it was nowhere close to the end for Earth life. There’s literally bacteria that makes it’s habitat in pools of acid. Humans are a weak, fragile species defended only by our ability to discern and invent the tools to do so, but Earth life in general is Amazingly robust, it grows in just about any crevice you show it. I just recently saw a story about worms that have adapted to shrug off the radiation of Chernobyl. Have you seen what a fucking tardigrade can be exposed to without dying?

Even our mother will eventually die, most likely from changes in our sun’s life cycle, and the universe will eventually suffer heat death, but our species will take itself out in fairly short order. Just smart enough to be dangerous to itself, and too stupid to know better.

That said, the Earth’s biome is more than capable of self-repair. Even we lack the capacity to sterilize every crevice of the Earth, life overall is too hearty for that, there’s innumerable species thriving where our technology barely lets us see that relies on geothermal vents more than solar radiation to keep entropic decay at bay.

Earth will rebuild when the dust settles, as it has done many times, even from one other time that we know of aside from ourselves when a costly, destructive mistake of evolution caused a mass extinction, the Devonian period, where trees captured too much carbon because the efficient means of their decomposition hadn’t evolved yet, causing the opposite of what we’re doing leading to an ice age.

We have already summarily executed swaths of entire ecosystems of species to build strip malls, parking lots, and oil refineries. And we’ve effectively ended many species we lock in cages for our amusement, wholly dependant on us breeding them having destroyed their natural habitats. Those species are ghosts, dead already, living trophies.

Long term, the species we take with us in our seeming dedication to self-annihilation will be a small price for the Earth to either be rid of us or more likelihood diminish us back to warring tribes having to subsist in a far less hospitable era of the world than the one we crawled out of and played pretend that we owned and could bend to our will. Most species that have ever lived came and went long before we arrived. Long periods of abundant life thriving in interconnected, interdependent ecosystems is whats important. Maybe it will one day birth something as remarkable, noble, sapient, and intelligent and we told ourselves we were one day, who knows? As long as theres life, there’s hope.

Am I supposed to feel bad for the bully in this story?

Nah, I take solace in knowing that if we destroy ourselves or collapse all civilization with our own self-destructive nature, life will go on and Earth will renew. We’re fuck ups to be sure, but even we can’t fuck up enough to completely sterilize the planet.

Maybe everything in all existence isn’t about us. Honestly I hope not.

Exactly what he was implying, I agree.

He’d be laughing his ass off, at our expense as we deserve, that’s for sure.

If our species cared about our species’ future, we would live with whatever energy generation our only habitat could environmentally tolerate/sustain, and we clearly wouldn’t have bred to the point that the planet is pushing back. Instead we STILL demand growth/metastasis. “growth or die!” Oh the delicious gallows irony. Homeostasis should have been our species’ business, but that ship has sailed.

Humans are so self-important that we don’t even seem to care about how fragile our situation is, and we all know at some level we’re going to be our own end.

Lets be fair, Steve Huffman did most of the work to make Lemmy so popular.

Shout out to the old r/jailbait mod for making in happen!

Yeah we’re all talk, and the owners know that.

Better not make us really angry, Owner class, or we’ll march to our local city halls that you already captured and own, and get a permit to protest you in a designated protest zone at a designated protest time so as to avoid inconveniencing you, in any way negatively effecting your daily exploitation activities, or potentially protesting somewhere in your line of sight.

That’ll show them!

That makes one of us, my friend.

I campaigned for Bernie twice, phone banked, went door to door, etc, and attended support rallies for Occupy Wall Street, but the more I learned, the more I realized how captured this system is. It has mechanisms in place to divide rising movements and indoctrinate us with the curriculum they inform from K-Colleges of economics to falsely believe we need the wealthy “job creators” and we need to work against each other.

This system cannot be repaired, it would collapse first before it would accept change that benefits Americans from the worst off up, it has been engineered for the opposite. I take solace in knowing that though I may not live to see it, Rome always falls in the end to its own corruption and decadence, and entropy cannot be cheated. This system will collapse, my money is on when crops start failing en masse from capitalist made climate change.

Us hemming and hawing about what parts of this system can be rehabilitated just keeps us indolent and divided, keeps the practicing sociopaths in charge, and keeps us literally stepping on the gas to extinction.

If we want our species to one day, long after we’re all dead, have a sustainable civilization on this world, we will have to suffer generationally undoing what has been done a piece at a time. Entire Generations will have to suffer to plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in if our species gives shit one about the survival of our species. We need to shrink our global footprint, we need to have our species as a whole more involved in our food production, we need to stop pretending any of us can live above nature in decadence.

But again, we won’t, despite our fictions we have no such nobility, so good luck to whatever sapient species comes after us.

Following the capitalists down their road of burning the world for short term private profit, laughing about rebranding the damage they do as “externalities,” is also the end, and if we want the truest of ends for our species with no survivors, save a few self burying sociopaths in bunkers watching the last flickers burn out, then we’re doing exactly what we need to be doing and we need only watch them do it.

There is no hope in maintaining the current course. None. We have the technologies to destroy the human habitability of our only world, the short term private profit motive to use them with reckless abandon, and no government or regulator they can’t buy standing in their way.

The practicing sociopaths have all the keys. What is the defining characteristic of a sociopath? “Benefitting myself will hurt other people? Pfffff 💵😂🖕”

Not if you destroy all the computers that store their ego scores/power, and that is far more essential. You just have to destroy enough servers and redundancies to make them people again. Then they don’t even matter, and can go off and die from being sheltered fancy lads and lasses their whole lives having to navigate a real world.

Their power is stored in bank and capital market records. Global financial systems and their redundancies need to be smashed to pieces and burned. We need to wipe the filth of their scam away. Getting them would just leave their power to their nepo babies and grand babies, taught at private schools from birth to see us as their livestock. That wouldn’t solve anything. Their record of wealth must be destroyed, and that means destroying all records of wealth. That is the cudgel they pass down generationally to beat us over the head with.

The billionaires can’t tie their own shoes without their cash machines and the lackeys they buy. We need to reset the Score to 0 for everyone, or they will continue to control us. No fair allocation can be discerned by this fucked global economy scam for anyone, as it was rigged from the start.

Don’t worry though, we won’t do anything except continue to destroy our own habitat to further enrich them. We need revolution, and that revolution’s most important soldiers would need to be talented analysts that can identify where the data and its redundancies are physically stored.

Yes, there’s people in this very post calling the idea of using force to end the capitalist’s reign of destruction of our only, shared, communal habitat a “tantrum.”

Maybe they think sucking up will get them a bunker invite, who knows.