Political Memes

Thanks for this, I wasn't sure where to look.

thanks brother <3

Yeah, I don't understand why those red boxes were added in the first place.

Doing the Lord's work. I missed half of OP due to lack of red outlines.

Eh? I still don't get it. Can you make it more clear?

OOP shoulda just edited the CSS to add

* {
  border: 1px red solid;
}

Ironically, the USA rank only 27th in the Global Social Mobility Index. The 1st is… Denmark, followed by other Northern Europe countries with high tax rates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index

You have more chance of "making it" in Denmark, providing you accept "making it" means getting a cozy comfortable life and not becoming filthy rich.

It's a cultural thing that's hard to even push back against. Like, I want people to be helped, I want nobody to have to go hungry or have to live on the streets or go broke from medical bills, regardless of how they live, and I know that taxes are the most effective way to do that, but still I find myself instinctively framing it as "taxes are the cheapest way for me to ensure I don't have to deal with a homeless person begging outside my apartment"

Also I think the idea that we're each personally entitled to approve of everything the government spends tax money on is a long game from the right to combat things like pushes for universal health care, government assistance of reproductive healthcare (I first saw this about abortion), and really any form of the government actually helping people instead of demanding charity make up the difference

I'm wondering if that could have ANY relation with oligarchs controlled medias repeating all day long how bad taxes are and how inefficient public anything is.

Edit: and adding this: conservatives (not MAGA, racists, etc. I mean genuine conservatives) are generally not against the idea of paying to help homeless, poors, etc. They are against the idea to defer that to the government. They want to make donations themselves. That boosts the ego, and that also allows them to cherry pick who deserves their help, and government is inefficient-blablabla. The irony of the logic is non-profit typically spend 20--40% of their budget on fund raising and administration. This is not a very efficient system from an economic standpoint. As for choosing who to help, they end up rewarding marketing skills rather than ranking who needs the most their help.

I think the problem arises when you pay a crapton on taxes, and then comes a billionaire that makes millions of profits and pays zero.

So then the average person gets angry about inequality but instead of demanding that everyone pay their share they think "who knows how many other cheaters are out there. If we can't hold them accountable, then I want to pay less too!".

Which of course is the wrong way to go about it but alas

I argued at length with an American who used to hang out in my friend group for a while. He couldn't stand the idea that his taxes would pay for anything other than his own problems. He called it "giving free handouts".

He'd repeatedly use arguments like "but if my taxes pay for healthcare, I'd be wasting my money on morbidly obese people who created their own problems".

He also loved status and exclusivity.

Socialism is thinking about the impact on other people. Maga is about that too, but in a negative way.

No, Denmark is not socialist. Socialized services under capitalism and literally collectivizing ownership of industry under socialism are very different regimes, even though they stem from a common conceptual foundation and share a linguistic root. Neither are bad ideas! But the former is still literally capitalism.

America isn't about "the people", it's just a business. The people are basically products that get sold as a service for the ~~companies~~ anyone wealthy enough.

It's like a nation of human trafficking. Marketed and disguised as freedom. Instead of drugs, the "pimp" markets lifestyles to them that hook them into working for less than they are worth or for less honest freedom than a human deserves. The "lifestyles" make the different groups easier to control. Like each lifestyle is a demographic and they get psychologically marketed to.

Part of this psychological idea is that one will hit this man-made manufactured rock bottom and run to the system as a saviour IF they are strong enough to survive it. Oddly enough this aligns with Freemasonry ideology. Being rebuilt from nothing into the ashler, but it's not something everyone is capable of doing and those that can't are basically disposable.

Typically if you don't fit one of their demographics you are an outcast and life is made harder for you on purpose because you are seen as someone that doesn't contribute to their system. These "outcasts" get "gangstalked" and pressured into fitting into their set demographics. If the person is unable to do that the person is systematically pressured into the prison system, psychiatric system, homelessness, or suicide.

It's a system that hides in plain sight. If you detox from American culture it becomes more visible but then you also risk getting fucked over for life. That's why it's like human trafficking. And once you really see it and understand, you can't hide from the reality. And the reality is gut wrenchingly surreal.