betelgeuse [comrade/them]

The motivations of wealthy libertarians are material, they don’t want to give up their wealth or ability to control resources. However, poorer libertarians don’t have that problem. They don’t have any wealth to give up. Therefore the ideology has to be tied to immaterial things like abstractions. It becomes about liberty, individualism, divine right, etc for them. The wealthy mystify their own relationship with labor and capital because it gives the workers a reason to join them rather than achieve class consciousness.

Dallas Fort Worth has a history of gas explosions after heavy rainfall due to the clay soil absorbing the water, expanding, then contracting, causing explosions.

???

It sucks that they killed Deus Ex and split up the shop for Guardians of the Galaxy. Now Dishonored is dead and the shop will be split up so they can do more Marvel slop.

Huffing my steam deck fumes, getting the munchies and eating the single hot chip and washing it down with the panera lemonade.

Israel is not Judaism and it’s not an ethnic group by your own admission. The idea that the Jewish people employ dark magic rituals that murder and consume children is antisemitic. The idea that the police and military of Israel, with the public at broad’s supports, kills children in the interest of national security is not.

We can distinguish between the two. You don’t seem to separate them, which is antisemitic.

When the materialism kicks in

We’ll have tea in the pusary

US collapse is going to be slow. We’re going to dwindle into corrupt fiefdoms led by various wealthy families and individuals. These people will be in various overt states of war and treaty, just like olden times. As it becomes more obvious we are nothing like the liberal ideal of America, they will further entrench themselves in patriotic and nationalist decoherence. Some will perform a ritual where they dress up as the Founders and pretend to be them, warping history around their present. Some will turn to Lincoln, JFK, Obama as the focus of their nationalist emanation. These strange outbursts of black comedy will be punctuated by bouts of violence. Domestic terrorist attacks, organized crime.

We’ll slowly become a reflection of our projections against the global south. A third-world country with world-leading poverty and a corrupt government funded by foreign capitalists trying to keep The American Project going long enough to finally defeat communism.

I’m sure Diebold and/or other companies that specialize in election hardware/security will be glad to land those contracts.

A lot of the things they say make me go “wait fucking wat”, and on some level that’s a good thing

Did you know that the US once tried to import hippos as a source of meat, as an alternative to cows?

The purpose of your life is to be a productive asset for people who make their living owning productive assets. They are in charge of the government and the economy and will never vote themselves out. They will kill to maintain their status as owners of productive assets because they do not want to become owned by someone else. They do spend a lot of time making sure you’re over stimulated because not only do you make the product for them you also buy the product from them. You’re a little blood bag in multiple ways and they are leeches.

They need you to vote for them, to make their actions legitimate so the whole thing doesn’t erupt in violence and get them killed. The most effective way to do that is to build a bunch of windmills at which you’ll tilt. They can’t make you hate other people for owning productive assets, so they have to come up with other reasons. And those reasons also have to work in their favor, as in make you hate their competition and enemies. You hate their enemies, who also own productive assets, but you hate them for largely abstract reasons detached from the actual reality of your exploitation. This dissonance creates malaise unless you feel like you’re discovering a deeper truth by buying into more propaganda. You get on another dopamine treadmill which ultimately leaves you unsatisfied no matter how angry you get. Because it’s never about recognizing your actual situation.

They need you to keep making product for them, because if you run out of product to make, they lose their livelihood. You also need to keep buying product. They sell you everything you need, making sure there’s as many people between it and you as possible, each extracting some profit. This causes friction which causes malaise. Once everyone has everything they need, they don’t sell as much product. This is bad so they invent need, they try to make you want stuff so you keep buying. This means they need more productive assets like yourself, this grows their empire. They come up with more abstractions for why you’re unhappy and how buying product will satisfy you. But with the accumulation you are still left unfulfilled.

This isn’t new and owning productive assets isn’t as profitable as it used to be. You need more and more to make the same amount of money, to keep the same amount of power. So the expansion and accumulation of more involves people like yourself being made miserable. They need war to go into other places and take over those productive assets. They need you to be on board for war so they have to demonize the other productive assets like yourself. They need you to fight in the war so you lose your friends and family. But to make up for that they abstract that exploitation away with fictions as well.

A society that allows a few people to collectively own all or most productive assets (ie, labor) will always result in this malaise. It will never bring you contentment. And if, by some chance, you get to own productive assets are now happy because you’re free from being owned, millions of others will take your vacancy from the working class. So you’re happy but they are not and their discontent will ultimately bring conflict, which makes you unhappy again.

Human experience is not profitable, or I should say, it is. As you’ve noticed, the amount of human experience you can afford or make time for is almost none. Your entire human experience is consumption and production. Even when you have fun you must consume product. You must pay a series of people who own the productive assets that produce your enjoyment. Reality is not helpful to the owners of productive assets. It just gets in the way.

You can’t imagine an alternative because the prospect of another promise of freedom from being owned is just too scary. You’re better to go with the devil you know.

You’re not unhappy because you’re possessed with bad spirits. You’re not unhappy because of some abstraction living across the ocean that exists to threaten your other coveted abstractions. You’re unhappy for a precise and easily explainable material reason. That reason is that you are exploited and are actively prevented from stopping it. You are manipulated into believing that exploitation is actually freedom. So in chasing freedom you either further exploit yourself or exploit others, adding to the general friction of society and life, causing misery.

Private insurance

If your goal was to house people then you could just charge the amount of property tax since your mortgage is $0. So, oof, yeah I do totally got you. Your investment is paid off, since the house is paid off. The only thing left is just wanting people to pay you for nothing.

Embrace what you are. Stop trying to abstract it behind being a saint or appeals to the market.

If you provided them at a reasonable price you wouldn’t make any money. Kinda telling on yourself there. The only way your business works is if you charge more than your mortgage. The bank is charging you for borrowing money so even they’re marking it up. The reasonable price would be the price without the bank’s markup and yours.

But hey you’re the Donald Trump of lemm.ee, so don’t let anyone ever tell you how da business goes. You grab your copy of Rich Dad Poor Dad and you solve the housing crisis by doing credit checks and marking up rents.

Wait, just so we’re clear on the timeline of human development. There were tribes and no society. Then there was the industrial revolution, English Common law, and then now?

You really, really, need to study history. You’re missing a few thousand years there. That’s probably why you’re confused. You really do think humans were savage tribes before 1492.

Go get those lumberjacks to cut down that forest… wait a minute… they won’t do it unless someone pays them??? Really?

Humans are a productive species and have produced many things necessary for survival long before capitalism or English property rights ever existed. You’re doing that thing again where you don’t know anything about history but you feel very strongly about defining the boundaries of human nature to be 17th century commerce. People don’t need money to produce things.

People also have shared responsibilities and duties. Nobody learns every single aspect of everything else. Some people are farmers, some are not. Some people build houses, some don’t.

Also paying for things is not unique to capitalism. Commerce has existed long before capitalism. It’s not like before 1800 everyone just traded chickens for everything.

You do, in fact, think people are slaves. You think they should work for a fraction of the value they create and then come home to pay you 2x the amount in rent. That way you get to pay off your mortgage and then keep collecting rent once your original investment is paid off. I guess that part is different from providing a necessary service, right? You just want to provide homes and get a huge return on investment. How pure are your motives?

I’m sure you’re clever enough to buy a farm and rent the fields to the workers and then rent them housing too. They give you a portion of their grain, it’s a fair trade after all, you own the farm. They should pay you for the privilege of working to keep you fed and housed. You should just chill and collect a check and bushel of grain every fall because you worked really hard to own that property. Totally not slavery.

Why does it matter if I personally hammered the nail or paid someone else for the house that he hammered the nail into?

Because that’s the definition of building it yourself.

helping myself does not harm anyone else.

Stating a thing does not make it so. Just stating you’re doing no harm doesn’t make it true. I can explain why you’re doing harm but you can’t explain why you’re not. Explanatory might makes right. We’re talking about the science of society, not vibes.

How do you even begin to think something is owned by the workers when they are not the ones paying for any of it.

Value comes from labor. A forest is nothing without the lumberjacks. A pile a logs is nothing without the workers of the saw mill. A pile of lumber is nothing without framers. A frame is nothing without drywallers, roofers, plumbers, electricians. The ownership you claim is just a piece of paper given by the state based on historical premises of property rights. It’s not a default state of nature nor a universal truth.

Wages are specifically designed to not pay them the full value of their labor. If you own a horseshoe factory that produces each horseshoe for $1, then you can’t pay a person $100 an hour to make 100 horseshoes in that hour. You wouldn’t make any money as the factory owner. So you must pay them less than the value they’re producing. It’s how businesses work. Likewise you can’t rent a house for profit without charging more than its worth. You can’t afford to build all those investment properties unless you pay the people who actually built them a fraction of what the house is worth. You exploited the people who built the house so you can sit on your ass and exploit workers who need a place to live. It’s quite simple.

Oh that’s funny because somehow I did manage to do just that… and I didn’t come from money or any special background. I applied for the scholarships, the loans, put in the work, forgo eating out for decades, looked for opportunities, leveraged my meager earnings into extra payments until I finally paid off my first house. Made sure I didn’t make a baby or get into massive credit card debt etc. I went and lived in the low cost areas no one cares to go to. I made the required sacrifices to eventually get to a better position.

There’s two ways to build wealth under capitalism. One is to get a bunch of people to work for you and pay them less than their labor is actually worth. The other is to leverage your capital, buy property and then become a rent-seeker and/or lender. That’s what you did. You were fortunate enough to be able to get loans and leverage your debt and get scholarships. Most people don’t get all that. The people you rent to don’t get that.

I said a bunch of arguments against yours. You can’t demand an argument from everyone and then when someone gives you wave it off as mere rhetoric. Yes it’s rhetoric. That’s what the word means. I think you’re just saying stuff based on vibes. You don’t actually know what words mean or have any real sense of your own position. You just know that you feel a certain way and want that to be as valid as my rational argument. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.

It’s also funny how you think not eating fast food and living in a place nobody wants to go is some grand sacrifice and the reason for what you have. Dude millions of people live without McDonald’s or a suburban home in the nice part of town. They also don’t get loans and scholarships. Their prostrations before capital go unnoticed.

Rather than demanding we disprove your views maybe you should spend some time thinking about why you believe them beyond “I’m a hard worker.” Like do you really think you’re the only person who has ever worked hard? Do you think that the reason why most people don’t have rental properties is because they’re not hard working? Imagine the hubris to think something like that.

where are you expecting people to live?

Houses and apartments. Like they do now.

These homes are owned by someone- they worked/paid/built them themselves.

Nope. Not worked/paid/built themselves. The vast majority of homes are made by people paying others to build homes for them. Labor is the source of value, not investors. This is like billionaires claiming to be job creators. You’re extracting the value of their labor to make your investment property. You’re paying them a fraction of what it is worth to you because you happen to live in a society where that is normal. Your lack of imagination beyond your current circumstances is not my problem.

Oh yeah, and even if you happen to build the house with your own hands, it is owned by someone, the bank where you got your construction loan.

Why do you think these people who have toiled for 40+years should just give you there invested money/work for free?

Why do you think people who work and toil away should pay your mortgage on an investment property and then some?

Why are they evil for using something they have worked for to help themselves?

Because helping themselves comes at the cost of someone else, and everyone else.

Inevitably someone like you comes along and just shitposts this same rhetoric you just did with no logical backing behind it other than “evil landlords must die and be redistributed”

You can say what you want about the rest of Hexbear but I can actually explain myself. Yeah, I’m one of those who have actually thought about stuff. In fact, I know more about real estate investing than you do.

How is a house different from a farm? Or a rail system? Or a insert anything created by someone and used for personal gain?

It’s not. They all belong to those who actually made them, the workers.

Why don’t you go build your own house? Why aren’t you giving these unfortunate souls your own place?

I can’t. Investors have inflated the cost of construction and increased the barrier to entry. They snuff out competition. Capitalism is built on lies. They don’t actually like competition. The whole idea is to consolidate and monopolize. If I did try to build low income housing I’d be ran off by all the investors who own everything. Housing poor people next to their investments lowers the value. This is multi-family 101 kiddo. Read a book.

To cap it all- you follow each other around in groups and rather than actually discussing you strawman, point people to communist propaganda, and generally troll anyone who disagrees with you. No one wants to join your club, no one wants to read your Marxism books etc. If you have a point- state it. Don’t point elsewhere and act like you won because we arent interested in your echochamber

The arrow of history disagrees. You probably should study the past sometime. Capitalism creates the conditions that make people want to join our club. It’s pretty much a law of human society.

It worked for the US. That’s why we defeated the invader Nazis and have no Nazis of our own anymore.

The way they tell it, you’d think everything from DW, to Fox, to Propublica, to straight up AP News articles, are all written by the same people.

Same type of person. Careerist strivers who all accept the basic liberal version of history and society. The liberal version of history coincides with the reactionary version of history because they both refuse to question the premises of capitalism. That is they both agree more over capitalism and Western Hegemony more than they disagree about specific cultural issues. They don’t all have to be in the same room, coordinating on a narrative because they all share the same boundaries of inquiry. So the same kind of stuff gets written without active coordination. This is a roundabout way to say they’re all of the same class. They have class solidarity.

A liberal news source will talk about how good and downtrodden immigrants are. A conservative news source will talk about how all immigrants are drug dealers. But they don’t disagree that there both needs to be immigration or that it needs to be regulated. A good real world example of this is Democrats flipping out over Trump’s racism and then upping funding for “border security” and advocating for a tech wall. Neither question the fundamental assumptions about immigration. Both advocate for the same idea, just in different abstractions. Nobody actually thinks the person who writes a bleeding heart article gets up from their chair and sits at a different desk where they write about caravans of cartel members. Though you do get the same person/organization drifting into sounding like their opposition, like the NYT. Which illustrates, again, that they’re the same class and ultimately share the same goals and fears.

It’s not a hard code to crack. You just have to be willing to actually question things and be curious. But there’s a lot of resentment in doing that (displayed here) because part of the media is propagandizing poor people and getting them adopt the same goals and fears as the upper classes. The people in government right now spent decades selling off your jobs and livlihood to cheaper areas of the world. Because it benefited them. One of those places was China. Capitalists gave China everything they needed to become what they are. It was fun when sowing. Now, because of problems in the West, China must become a talking point and scapegoat. The rich don’t like them because they’re closing themselves off from foreign investment and they’re not playing ball with our foreign policy. That is they pose a threat to unite with other countries and close off investment as well. If US companies can’t set up shop in Taiwan, for example, that hurts wealthy people in the US. You don’t have that wealth or investment so that argument won’t work on you. Therefore the problem must be abstracted and layered under a bunch of cultural or moral arguments. So you get stories about how the Chinese are all savage bug people who work like robots to overthrow your way of life. They’re violating your liberal ideals of free speech. They’re detaining Muslims so they’re too racist. They don’t like LGTBT people. They ruin your bitcoin gambling. They kill their people by cooking in sewage oil and their buildings fall down.

This is to get you to share opposition to China so that by the time we work ourselves into a War, you won’t really question why your children are fighting in it. They’ll go die so that US companies can keep pumping out resources from those countries and keep the competition out. All the sentiments about honor and duty and security and freedom are a lie.