It's a similar comparison to Luigi Mangione
One person was responsible for killing or leading to the deaths of thousands and possibly millions of people to an early death - no one bats an eye
One person was responsible for directly killing one other person - the whole country loses their minds
So much of this is filtered through the national corporate media. Quite a few people bat an eye at the vulgar abuse of power by insurance adjusters. But they aren't afforded a platform on your Cable News outlet of choice.
Vanishingly few people were sympathetic towards an unknown CEO of a notoriously skinflint insurance company. But he was lionized and eulogized on every national news station.
In the same vein, most people slept through Kapernick taking a knee. It wasn't properly news until weeks after he first did it, in large part because it took that long for right-wing anchors to notice. By contrast, the Elon Fascist Dab was headline news within seconds of him performing it and only got talked down to "Autistic Man's Arm Just Did That And It's Ablest Of You To Notice" after days of equivocating in papers and news channels of record.
The Consent, folks. Its being Manufactured.
Omfg I'm gonna stab someone. How the hell are they trying to use autism as an explanation?
This is not how any of this works. You don't start stimming in a perfect right wing gesture. He never did something like this before in public. He also doesn't look startled or anything.
I'm mad now. How did this chipmunk become a government advisor? I want him to trip on Lego so bad.
the
whole countryruling class loses their mindsOh yeah, Luigi definitely came up as a topic of discussion over the holidays when I was visiting the conservative side of my family. I considered it a win that they at least acknowledged that the legal system and media works differently for the rich and powerful. I mean, common ground is common ground.
Yeah, because it breaks the social order. The number of people killed by the health insurance industry must be astronomical. But it's No Big Deal, because it's Business As Usual.
Somebody killing a CEO, though. That is not business as usual.
If that's the social order.... Then fuck the social order.
It's not just the Fascist Far-Right who exploit the human tendency for Tribalism, the Neoliberal Far-Right does it too, they just mix it a bit more with exploiting other cognitive weaknesses in human beings.
That said, the latter political group did fail miserably in getting people to feel like the Healthcare Insurer CEO "is one of us" and Luigi "is one of them" possibly because all the usual group definitions the Neolibs tried to push to get people into group-oriented thinking on the side of the CEO (strivers vs skivers, family man vs lone wolf and so on - just read the newspaper articles and you'll spot the framing) failed as people already felt more like the victims of businesses like Healthcare Insurance than "winners" of the profits such business make.
I haven't quite figured out how to put it into words but in my mind it seems like capitalism and Nazi Germany or the USSR share a core mechanism. A single death is a tragedy, but many deaths are a statistic. When a singular person does something bad they need to be punished. If a system does something bad, even if a singular person or group of people were directly responsible for setting up the system they do not receive the consequences.
It's also the reason automated systems being used for making decisions that affect real human lives bother me so much right now. In a vacuum I don't actually have a problem with them, but unless laws and regulations with teeth are put in place to hold those that implement them responsible for their mistakes then under our current system by definition they will only ever be used to maximize profits and minimize culpability.
Maximizing profits and missing culpability is capitalism, working as intended.
With that said, the system is only working on behalf of those with the money. The 0.1%
I say again: the system is working as intended.
Remember when they boycotted the NFL: they were never going to watch woke NFL again. And NBA. And Target. And Bud Light.
How'd that work out? Where are they now?
Right back where they always were.
That unnecessary comma makes this read like a command
Some people have a problem with the left photo, some with the right photo. And some are furious because of THAT FUCKING COMMA!!!!
why use an Oxford comma when you can just
can just end the fucking sentence.
When "they" make a statement it's bad, when "we" make a statement it's good.
It's pretty standard tribalist thinking.
Whilst not at all exclusive to people of the Far Right (it's a natural tendency in all of us which, IMHO, we need to be alert for and stop it when it pops up in ourselves), tribalism it is the core (maybe even the entire foundation) of Far Right authoritarian "ideologies" (the non-authoritarian ones, like Neoliberalism, also exploit other human cognitive weaknesses).
One is an act of protest and the other is an act of hate.
And the underlying message of one is that we should love different people, while the message of the other is that we should hate and fear different people.
Signed: disgusted white American guy.
People who think it's just "bad" to criticize their government don't know the difference between their government and their mommy.
Yeah, it’s a similar sort of immaturity where good boys and girls don’t question what they’re told. (Emphasis these days on “boys and girls only” am I right?)
I think reasonable adults understand that everybody and everything are flawed. It’s how you react to them that matters. People deserve compassion and understanding from the get-go, and they have the right to just exist. Governments and companies start in no such place, and they have a much lower threshold before they should be told to fix their shit.
Starring this comment.
Ugh yeah, that's how hypocrisy works.
Of course. The people with the problem seeing the left picture are the people on the right.
It's just a meaningless gesture why are you upset.
🤏
Edit: let me clarify that - people who are saying Musk's gesture doesn't mean anything, are the same people getting offended when they see pinching fingers...
What do the pinching fingers mean, or are said to mean?
A system's purpose is what it does
Spot on.
What is the Grey Wolves Salute.
So if I were to rest my chin on my hand while thinking something and accidentally move my fingers upto my lips, people will now start having a problem.
If this keeps going on, a few centuries down the line, we will have to tape our wrists behind our backs while walking around town because doing anything with our hands would be some kind of gesture. And then, because even that will have become some kind of gesture, we would have to amputate our arms from birth to prevent ourselves from offending someone.?
Jokes aside, this symbolism stuff is getting out of hand, with stuff like - women getting beaten up by some anti-feminism fan for having short hair and age old traditional symbols being seen in a bad light, just because a genocidal government plagiarized it.
Why is it that we are collectively ignoring useful stuff from events throughout history, while causing random symbolisms to stay relevant for so long that they are hindering our quality of life?
White man's overbite included.
Yes exactly
Not a meme
