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Maybe that is why he doesn’t have any friends
what empathy???
Ah yes, the overflowing empathy of the military.
or the USAss
Someone needs to shoot that guy in the neck.
I’ll help fund this
I never understood why they ended USAID. It has been such a fantastic tool for destabilizing non-allies, so democrats and republicans alike should love it. And aside from that, it also did some actual good stuff like medical aid, so even progressives like it. It seems like such a win win, yet here we are. Is it just incompetence?
The right ended USAID because the right hates the thought of helping others
They quite literally CANNOT compute empathy, they’re narcissistic apes who only care about themselves
The destruction of USAID killed around 60,000 people in just a few months and could kill over 30 million over the course of several years due to the lack of basic (and extremely cheap) care.
As far as I am concerned, any bitching they claimed about the death toll of communism needs to be shut down with simply that.
The GOP was putting out a lot of bullshit about how the US spends so much money on other countries and doesn’t help people at home to get votes for a long time. Eventually some people that actually believed the bullshit got into power and killed it.
Really USAID was about soft power. The US provides aid and that allowed the US the threaten to cut off aid if a country didn’t go along with US interests. Way cheaper than threatening to use military force to get your way.
USAID had a lot of problems and definitely could’ve been made a lot more efficient. But eliminating it was a stupid move.
In many places China stepped in when USAID was gone. Not because of altruism but because China wants that soft power the US abandoned.
Yes, it was incompetence.
The obsession with hard power is their undoing. If your only means of coercion is shoving a gun against their head, it makes it very, very easy for the coerced to say ‘fuck off’ and ally themselves with your enemies. Chinese soft power is something that the USSR only dreamed of having but could never achieve.
They want brown people to die.
Yeah, and destabilizing regions with brown people in them is a very effective way of doing that, hence my confusion.
no they want to see them die as a direct result of their giant penises pulling the boom boom trigger
The fundamental problem of all civilization is not hanging billionaires.
A short drop and a sudden stop would solve that problem for sure.
We have so much stigma around being poor. I would probably cry myself to death out of joy if I woke up in a world where people felt shame for hoarding wealth.
There was this British yt speaking about the societal changes and she said “rich people invented homelessness and they’ve been mad about it ever since”. Back in the medieval Times, humility was a virtue and priests made vows of poverty.
Yeah, I saw that same video. What is so incredible is how it completely destroyed wages for workers that the average worker in 1450 wouldn’t make the same until 1850 or so.
We don’t have to hang them, just put a wealth tax on them before they become billionaires.
But for anyone who has a billion I think it’s OK to take it all, because nobody should be so selfish so they have more than a billion.The thing is that we already have a lot of billionaires. We do not to get rid of those before preventing more being created, because they are not going to give up being billionaires voluntarily.
I’d really rather hang them though…
Its certainly simpler, though hardly a solution. There’s always more billionaires unless you change the system that created them.
We could just keep hanging them.
Pretty sure that you’d have less and less once you start hanging them, but of course, I am not an expert (yet).
I mean would you want to become a billionaire if you knew you’d end up hanging?
Tax them, give them a choice, and if they choose…poorly, then hang them.
I bet you if ceos start erm, falling down due to high speed objects that may affect brain functions , things get changed fast
Tax.
Its not complicated. It might take a few goes to get it just right but what we have now is pathetic.I agree, but also…There are famously ways to avoid taxes. You need a backup plan when taxation doesn’t work. And remember, once someone becomes trully wealthy, they’re above the law.
I’m definitely for a change of the system too, but in the meantime there always more rope too.
I won’t stand in your way. I am in principle against death penalty, but sometimes you have to break a few eggs.
Yeah they think they’re so great and untouchable. Let them find out they’re mortal and fallible.
The problem is hierarchies. The entire point of feudalism was to create a caste system where the ruler of each segment won’t be touched by the people below them. That’s exactly what modern society by and large looks like.
Until everyone’s equal, no one is. Hierarchical systems are antithetical to peace and equality.
More and more I’m thinking we really need a wealth tax. Not because the government needs the money - the government literally makes their own money, they can create as much of it as they want - but because I think a cap on wealth is necessary for social cohesion. Plus, once people get over a certain level of wealth, the chances of it seriously negatively affecting them psychologically seem to go up considerably. Many, if not most, billionaires are just weird, creepy, disturbed wackos. I don’t think it’s good for them or for society.
I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to capping individual wealth at $999 million. Another option might be to set the maximum at a percentage of GDP, maybe something like 0.01% of GDP. I think that would put the cap at just over $3 billion. That’s still an astronomical amount of money, and there would still be billionaires but not the mega, stupid billionaires.
a cap on wealth is necessary for social cohesion.
Billionaires are undermining democracy, which already is a huge problem and against the values of a country that wants to be democratic.
Yes most billionaires end up wackos, which makes it even worse that they have so much power.
IMO you can add an extra zero to the decimal places to make it 300 million. 1 billion is IMO already to much.
But I wouldn’t make it a hard limit, just incrementally bigger tax percentage the higher you get.IMO you can add an extra zero to the decimal places to make it 300 million.
Sounds good to me.
More and more I’m thinking we really need a wealth tax. Not because the government needs the money - the government literally makes their own money, they can create as much of it as they want - but because I think a cap on wealth is necessary for social cohesion.
This is literally what the inheritance tax is for, so there’s precedent.
Of course, they piss and moan about that too, but I don’t give a shit and neither should anyone else.
Even $1,000,000,001 is too much. I’d probably cap it somewhere closer to $10m, if we have to use money.
It’s really not effectively managing selfishness.
Because we have too much empathy for them?
Billionaires are just a symptom of the corrupt system. You cannot oppose billionaires with opposing the system that creates them.
It’s easy to not have empathy. It’s hard to be empathetic. Being good is hard work. Being evil is easy.
I also disagree. There is nothing easier than being nice, and relating to what others are going through because we all go through things.
It is easy for government or states to not have empathy because they are this big omnipresent, almighty entity that isn’t responsible for anything (it is responsible but nothing will happen because it won’t punish itself so you can blame it but it’s pointless), rarely the public officers are responsible, they cover one another, it is easy to cancel helping programs and easier to create barriers. And then you find yourself in this group of people that isn’t responsible for anything, but for common individuals it’s easy to be nice, easier than being an asshole.
Disagree. Being nice and having empathy is actually really fucking easy, at least to the people you directly interact with. It’s only hard when we’re burnt out, which capitalism is really good at making everyone.
Doesn’t work like that for me. If I see someone in pain, I feel their pain. If they cry out, it hurts to my core. That’s empathy.
The hard part for me is not being able to do anything about it. It is often not my place, I don’t know the correct course of action or I don’t have the means. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t play on my conscience.
And it’s harder still is seeing those with the means apparently be able to completely ignore any empathy or conscience they might have. Maybe they don’t have any. Maybe they can’t tell the difference between that and annoyance at the noises the person in pain is making, so they ignore it or try to shut the injured up in other ways.
You said it yourself. You don’t know the correct course of action. That’s the hard part. Figuring out what to do. Finding resources to help. All of that is hard. At least harder than being evil.
I can assure you, I feel no empathy towards you Elon Musk.
You mean, humanity’s single-biggest cancer cell…?
How DARE you! 😠
Ah yes, we fight wars because we’re just so gosh darn empathetic.
It’s specifically Ukraine defending itself and some American guy helping out willingly. But I see that .ml
The second panel hit me hard, knowing how USAID operates in practice relative to how it is portrayed in media.
After taking power in April 1978, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) instituted an array of socialist policies, including “land reform, growth in public services, price controls, separation of church and state, full equality for women, legalization of trade unions and a sweeping literacy campaign.” This might seem like a positive development, but not in the eyes of the U.S. empire and its capitalist agenda. In addition to the CIA’s covert support for the mujahideen’s holy war against the secular evils of increased living standards and women’s rights, USAID also played an interesting role in this conflict.
The agency reportedly spent $50 million on a “jihad literacy” program in Afghanistan, primarily during the 1980s. This effort included the publication and distribution of ultra-conservative textbooks that “tried to solidify the links between violence and religious obligation,” according to author Dana Burde. Lessons on basic math and language were accompanied by depictions of Kalashnikov rifles, grenades, ammunition, and a commitment to militancy and retribution against the Russians (who were depicted as “invaders” despite having been invited to lend military assistance by the PDPA). After consolidating power in the ‘90s, the Taliban government revised and reprinted these textbooks, and copies have even been found in Pakistan as recently as 2013.
Assisting the Taliban’s precursor with reactionary, jihadist propaganda to viciously sabotage a progressive, feminist government and its allies is a strange form of “humanitarianism.” You might even say it’s the opposite of humanitarianism. Was this just a mistake that USAID made in the distant past and has since learned from, or is there a continued pattern of this behavior?
Fortunately, Afghanistan was half a world away. We liberated a foreign country from Soviet aggression. We struck a blow against Radical Leftist Socialism. And, as a consequence, we restored liberty and democracy to Eastern Europe. There wasn’t any risk of a radicalized movement of ultra-conservative religious fundamentalists ever doing anything that might blow back on American civilians.
I don’t think it’s fair to give all the credit to the US on that one. The communists who took over were really a small urban elite of sorts and were pushing for highly unpopular changes really fast. Especilaly the rural more conservative population was against them even without any US involved, US just helped that effort.
The West ? Empathy ?
Since when ? If anything the West never had empathy in the first place. All those wars you caused were NOT empathy.
This is an intelligent comment because no other cardinal direction has caused wars
The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is whatever let people like Musk attain great wealth and a platform, despite their incredible bias and incompetence.
Yeah, western civilization was really brimming with empathy for all those slaves and indigenous people. 🙄🙄🙄🙄
Sadly, they see that as the golden age.
Empathy is a danger to civilization
There goes 2 hours I had absolutely no intention of spending there.
Ooooh this is straight up Lemmy bait here.
