Desperate people are also easier to turn on each other. Maintain your communities everyone, don't let the hyper rich convince you it's anyone else but them and their greed that are hurting you.
Very valuable addition to an already quite an impactful illustration.
It's sad that this is happening in real time pretty much all over the globe
Seriously, I feel like every major region of the world has a loud guy telling them some other religious/cultural group is out to get them. When in reality the group that's out to get them is billionaires.
No war but class war.
All the the social issues we want to kill one another over are either CAUSED BY or greatly EXACERBATED BY the economic war we have fully lost.
Example: if the anti-abortion people actually wanted fewer abortions, they'd fight for UBI and living wages, as abortion is very often, correctly an economic decision, but we're only permitted a vote on the symptoms, not the cause, the massive owner class grift we call our economy. This is true for basically every social wedge to varying extents.
Want fewer prisoners? Want fewer homeless? Want fewer drug addicts, want fewer suicides, want better healthcare outcomes, want public Schools that aren't embarrassing? Cut the mega yacht class down to earth and feed the commons, which include the social supports Reagan/bush/clinton spent decades eviscerating into today's ruins.
This is an excellent visual aid - appreciate the share
Any info on source?
Not sure.
Found it was cropped:
If someone wants to browse the TinEye search they might find something:
The artist looks to be Modern Toss. They have a Facebook page posting these comics and a book.
I can tell by the content it's from the 2014 Australian budget. Infamously Joe Hockey, the treasurer from the Liberal party government at the time (the conservatives, no surprises there), was photographed happily smoking a cigar the day the budget was released. Being a conservative budget, it was not good for the proletariat.
Why did they swap the order of the characters in the second row? This upsets me
The mom got to the interview late cause they couldn't find a sitter (at least that's what I'm telling myself).
Great post. Can you clarify for me what ATSI and Newstart are?
Must be a 'straylian meme
ATSI - indigineous people (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander)
more
The term Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples or the person's specific cultural group, is often preferred, though the terms First Nations of Australia, First Peoples of Australia and First Australians are also increasingly common …
Newstart [Allowance] - "main unemployment benefit paid to eligible Australians and permanent residents aged 22 to 64"
I also think social media provides a useful smoke screen for the rich and powerful in a similar way. It keeps you so bogged down with bullshit non-news and irritated with each other because of your slightly different viewpoints on it that you miss the big issues of the day and people can get away with larger and larger crimes and corruption without consequence.
What's an ATSI program?
While there is more then a grain of truth to this, still seems to be time for distracted voters to watch Netflix, goto concerts, watch movies, goto sporting events. You're not going to get out from under any of this by substituting screeching about the need to pay bills, for activism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses
Juvenal originally used it to decry the "selfishness" of common people and their neglect of wider concerns. The phrase implies a population's erosion or ignorance of civic duty as a priority
You can be distracted and not Vote GOP for example.
The "people are selfish" take is an outdated one at best, ignorant at worst.
Desperate people with major problems are often highly motivated to solve those problems, which often leads them, paradoxically, to seek out distractions that make their problems disappear, albeit temporarily. Psychologically this satisfies the brain the same as if the problems were actually solved; in other words, it's a shortcut to the emotional end goal of satisfaction.
Is it selfish? Partly yes, but it's not any more selfish than actually working to solve one's problems in more permanent ways. Therefore it's awfully reductive to ascribe this behavior to mere selfishness.
Thanks to centuries of research on human behavior & mental health that was done after Juvenal in Ancient Rome, it's obvious that desperate & stressed people seek out distractions to self-soothe, so they can avoid burnout and continue being functioning members of society. Therefore to some extent this behavior can also be seen as selfless.
The idea of "Bread and circuses" as lavish distractions from reality is valuable insofar as it reveals the primary mechanisms deployed by governments and corporations to control the attention of the population.
By providing highly palatable mass-produced foods and entertainment, they take advantage of workers' need to rest, recover and feel some amount of satisfaction in their daily lives. This sustains the working population just enough to put up with going to work day after day. And I haven't even touched on how food and media are used to keep us going to the doctor and to influence our thoughts.
I think that both apply right? The populace is too exhausted from working, can barely afford to eat - but they just barely can. But what we have now is incredibly cheap widespread entertainment that we can passively absorb until the next day when we are forced to get up and do it all again just to survive.
We have bread, and we have circuses, but absolutely no more. Plus our circus keeps us fixated on blaming the others.
