What If We’re the Bad Guys Here? | Hacker News Reader

What If We’re the Bad Guys Here?

nytimes.com

14 pointsjustinzollars11 comments

Everyone is so close to “getting it” without actually getting it.

He’s describing the capital class and how the process of elite overproduction, hoarded wealth and insular investing/cash outs destroys all other classes of labor until everyone gets fed up and start destroying each other.

However he (NYT/PBS right wing commentator) doesn’t see it cause he’s so indoctrinated into the religion of capitalism and views it as some neutral or benevolent force of nature.

It’s all unfortunately predictable.

I agree with you and the developments you mention are serious problems.

But all those developments were catalyzed by political and economic policies put in place or actively enabled by politicians who were enthusiastically elected and re-elected over and over again by the very people those policies hurt the most. And the response of those hurt is to elect even worse politicians who enact even more damaging policies.

This is no secret and has been actively discussed and lamented among liberal elites for decades.

It was a high-ranking member of the elite who said "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result." The chief difference between the classes may be that one understands this and the other refuses to contemplate it.

At the end of the day, if people continue to insist that you take their money and use it to hurt them, it just seems impolite not to.

I'm not sure we could even place the blame on the politicians, the political system or anything specific to business in a broad sense. People will do whatever is necessary to contribute to the growing disparity of outcomes in our society , and there seems to be no way to stop them from doing so .

My observation of the moment is that, in my country, people are right now tripping over one another to go throw money at a national lottery that is going to make one of them an instant billionaire, an absolutely unaccountably wealthy individual who will promptly disappear with all of that cash in their pocket to dispose of as they wish. This is actually something that sets them apart from ordinary billionaires, the ones so commonly despised by the very class of people who contribute to this spectacle, because they are not public figures and because their wealth is not tied up in shares or options or proprry or anything really, it's pure liquid cash.

Which makes this individual even more of an authentic billionaire than the ones normally listed as such.. Someone who despite doing absolutely nothing of productive value, who may very well simply vaporize much of the money in casinos and dozens of expensive automobiles and an entire small township worth of superfluous houses, and of course gifts to a specialized class of frauds and charlatans who specialize in bulking these people.

And the only reason that this doesn't happen at another 10 or 100 fold scale is that the government has declared a monopoly on running blatant pyramid schemes such as Powerball and Mega Millions.

I don’t disagree with anything there.

I however choose to be optimistic that there’s a way out, or if not “out” then at least something more humane than what we’re doing now.

> hoarded wealth and insular investing/cash outs destroys all other classes of labor until everyone gets fed up and start destroying each other

Declining prosperity in the lower/middle classes is a recipe for social/political discord. If prosperity is increasing, the more privileged half is less likely to fear losing their status, and minorities and the underprivileged feel like they have a fighting chance at a better life.

Take that away and people get crazy.

"It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class."

The author assumes that the demographic of Trump supporters includes more "less-educated" people than non-Trump supporters without presenting any supporting evidence or citations. I'd like to see some statistics to support this assumption.

Victor Davis Hanson (PhD, Stanford) wrote a piece yesterday that well explains why educated people support Trump.

https://victorhanson.com/the-remaking-of-america/

This article is written by an ideologue and doesn't even make an attempt to speak to those outside their reality bubble.

> Never in U.S. history have the Department of Justice and sympathetic state and local prosecutors indicted a leading opposition candidate and likely nominee of one of the two major parties, and at the beginning of a presidential campaign.

Eugh, completely unconvincing. Never in US history has a former POTUS attempted to thwart succession of the presidency, not to mention the keeping of classified documents after leaving office and bragging about it. Trying to frame this as purely a political game isn't going to work on anyone actually paying attention (read the indictment[0] and tell me that it's all just posturing/political blustering)

> The media routinely accuses conservative justices of improper or illegal behavior, without worry about the emptiness of the charges.

Cool, let's just completely memory-hole Clarence Thomas's totally not suspicious gifts[1] from rich people. This author loses absolutely all credibility here. The mask of an ideologue slips off real quick.

[0]: https://www.justice.gov/storage/US_v_Trump_23_cr_257.pdf

[1]: https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-un...

Not to mention getting spies and informants killed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/us/politics/cia-informant...

> The author assumes that the demographic of Trump supporters includes more "less-educated" people than non-Trump supporters without presenting any supporting evidence or citations. I'd like to see some statistics to support this assumption.

> Victor Davis Hanson (PhD, Stanford) wrote a piece yesterday that well explains why educated people support Trump.

If you're going to complain about a lack of data (which is wholly reasonable!) then you should probably refrain from linking an alternative view which also fails to present any data. The best data I could quickly find shows[0] a noticeable but not gigantic skew towards Democrats/Biden among college-educated voters in 2020, and a report from Pew[1] with finer grained categories shows a nearly 2:1 ratio of (registered) Democrats:Republicans among voters with postgraduate educations in 2019.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/...

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/10/26/what-the-...

Never in US history has someone already under multiple major, publicly known criminal investigations declared themself a candidate for the Presidency and become the frontrunner of a major party.

But, yeah, declaring yourself a candidate isn’t a get out of crime free card.

The GOP likes to say its the state and federal governments unprecedentedly criminalizing politics but that’s just a distraction from the fact that the GOP is unprecedentedly, for a major party, making criminality their politics.

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