Ask Lemmy

American billionaires

Tech bros? Especially Peter Thiel. I thought this is common knowledge already.

It's a two-pronged attack.

One is russia. They have "chaos campaigns" going back decades just to sow discord and cause disruption in Europe. There's no better discord and disruption than threatening the EU as a whole.

The second is big American businesses and billionaires, because they hate how the EU presents a unified front against their bullshit and actually forces them to do things that chip into the bottom line.

When you are losing control of a situation but desperatly need things to change, you can either accept waves of change and try to move and hopefully grow with it or violently reduce the complexity of the problem by enforcing ridge structures around the problem set.

Think about it in terms of food spoiling. One option is to actually encourage it, make beer, wine, vinegar. Maybe replant it sooner. Maybe encourage other creatures to eat it first like your pets.

The other option is to sterilize everything. Destroy all life so only no living food stuffs remain. Isolate it, vaccum seal it, can it, dry it, freeze it. Try evertthing you can to turn the dynamic into the static.

Both options honestly work in this small human scale problem. We do it for all sort of things invluding social problems. Maybe throwing yourself out there will help you get over that breakup, maybe just focusing on yourself is what you need.

The allure of the right wing is the idea that we can do that at sociotal level. Ignore the world. The other. Just your countrymen, just the ones that act like the genders you expect, just the moral systems you know, etc etc.

As if you vaccum sealed the world by ideolgical catagory alone. It static. Its white bread just like when you imagined, just like when you bought it, just like when you had as a kid.

I'm actually really sympathetic to it. I want a sinpler world that is easy to reason about too. Its just not reasonable. Its boiling the ocean so you don't have bateria eat your fish. Its a very human handons thinking applied by the man made deity we call the state.

Knowing this flaw in human reasoning, the immoral can exploit it. They can say 'i found a bug", "i found mold" and then sell a "solution" to thr "problem" that billions of people operation of the scale of trillions of tons of matter moved is going to more complex then how 20 to 150 should orginaize to move a couple tons per year.

Vladimir Putin.

Billionaires are pouring infinite money into right wing movements. They have no scruples and can pay anyone they need to get what they want done. The problem is capitalism because it creates extreme unelected power in an extremely small self interested minority. They also fund the power centers of the left to keep things from moving too far against them. Elections move on money far too much. In the end, you can’t have democracy and capitalism. Slowly capitalism always tries to swallow democracy.

I cant speak to european causes, but as Americas' culture tends to set the pace of world events since the end of the second world war, it's entirely possible that there is a connection.

in the united states you need to know about two individuals that are primarily responsible for the rise of right wing populism and corporatocracy. The first is a Proto-Christian Nationalist and white supremacist by the name of Barry Goldwater, and the other was a Neo-Calvinist and Objectivist "thinker"* Lewis F. Powell, Jr. (*and I use the term loosely)

Barry Goldwater was a driving force in opposition to the civil rights movement, and primary architect of the modern Conservative platform. He played a rather large part in the Great Lane Swap where Southern Democrats switched to the Republican Party and Northern Republicans became the core of centrist Neoliberalism.

Where Lewis Powell comes into the mix is his treatment (now known simply as the "Powell Memorandum") called "Attack On the American Free Enterprise system" where he bemoans Corporate regulation as "holding back" the potential of not just American but Western Capitalism to enrich those who he deems worthy of greatness. (If you are familiar with the writings of Ayn Rand, this kind of "why do I need to share?!" Objectivist whining should sound similar.)

In both cases, they set up the groundwork and built the nascent foundations of the conservative political strategy we see to day that has resulted in much of the worlds' oligarchic tendencies. Goldwater's contribution was to recognize that conservative messaging had an image problem and rather than accept that the message was the problem, it was the recipients of that message who needed to be controlled and reeducated. To that end he further recognised that what kept the populace averse to conservative messaging was the Institutions of Liberal Democracy, namely free access to education, the social safety net, and strong labor movements. By eradicating these pillars where able, and eroding their influence continually, this would allow a formation of a systemic return to fundamentalist christianity as the fall back for what he deemed a corrupt and wonten society. (To wit; This guy would have thought "The Handmaid's Tale" was a fine book if only the main narrator was one of the men leading Galead, and not the woman who's rights had been stripped away.)

Powell, on the other hand, was a corporate lawyer by trade, and the person most responsible for corporate deregulation and "trickle-down economics." He promoted the idea that "a rising tide lifts all boats" as a justification for these actions, and used outmoded Calvinist ideas (just given a fresh coat of paint for the times) to justify the rule that the economically unsuccessful should move out of the way for those who could maintain economic success, and that such a system would be a driver of economic mobility by "encouraging" people to take agency in their own social status (Read: He thought the welfare state made people lazy and that forcing them to face a choice between destitution or participation would be a motivating factor for them to work harder, and thus increase profits at the top, which would then percolate down as the wealthy invested in new opportunities and ideas.) He saw labor unions as not just Socialist Infections but as the driving force preventing these phantom profits from bubbling up to those who he believed would be most suited to "properly" distributing them. If this sounds alot like "the peasantry don't know how to spend their money, better to let the nobility have it" congrats, you win a gold star.

In both cases, the philosophies meshed very well as each supported the goals and methods of the other. By deregulating business, it allowed corporations to attack traditional power bases of the left wing, entrenching a kind of Capitalist Nobility as the only people who could actually make it in the new system, and blinding the working class to the fact that social mobility was little more than a myth used as a ideological carrot on a stick that kept productivity KPIs artificially high.

Other factors that lead to this situation are supreme court rulings in the 1920's, specifically Henry Ford Vs. The Dodge Brothers, that inadvertently set the precedent that the point of any business was not to enrich its workers evenly or even commensurately with its owners, but to maximize profits to the shareholders. Another stumbling block for Leftist thought is Article One of N.A.T.O. which states that every member state must engage in a capitalist free market economy - a damn shame because otherwise N.A.T.O. is one of, if not the, most important defensive alliance in the promotion of omnipax world politics in human history. (Not to say it has always been successful toward that goal, mind.) Even more than the United Nations, in many regards.

That last bit may be more salient to the European perspective, as there is STILL a mindset of eurocentrism even as the world becomes more globalist and western influence wanes now that the age of colonialism is largely over. Mass migrations due to the policies of unchecked corporate power causing the lands these migrants hail from despoiled and unlivable, makes the supporters of these same mentalities quite ironic. Instead of bemoaning the influx of such individuals, and chafe at their presence, one would think that expending resources and investing to improve the living conditions of these places such that immigration from them be unnecessary, would be a more adroit course of action, and yet here we are. It's easier to complain that the world is ugly than face the fact that your ideology is partly to blame, I suppose.

I assume politics goes through generational pendulum swings.

People feel betrayed because they can't feel the benefits of economic growth. Jobs aren't safe anymore. But funding a family still requires a stable income. Humans love having social and economic security. If a government refuses to make that happen, they will vote for whoever promises to punish the old government - even if no fix for any of the actual problems is proposed.

If you are a politician, the solution is disgustingly trivial: stop taking bribes and do your job. Governments are infrastructure. They are meant to support the people governed by them.
So far the solution implemented by the big old parties was to double down on making everyone but the Epstein class poorer until voter morale improves.

The world is complex. Humans aren't equipped to deal with that level of complexity. Also the amount of information we are bombarded with is far beyond what we have evolved to deal with.

The right offers a simple solution.

There is one group, "the other", that is the root cause of all your problems. Get rid of them and everything will be swanky again.

This plays on one of our earliest and most ingrained senses of survival. As a social tribal species, we are very good at noticing things that are "like us" and "normal". "Different" and "new" was a potential threat. It literally kept our species alive against far more powerful predators and competition from like species back we we huddled together against the dark night.

Unfortunately we're just wired that way. It takes knowledge, wisdom and a healthy dose of curiosity/wonder to overcome that. Why do you think one of the first goals of the right is to dismantle education?

Inequality and decades of painting anything left as evil communism.

Plus liberals would rather hand the reins to fascists than socialists.

Too many things honestly. Hidden racism, normalizing "if you can do it, you should do it" with unshakable faith that "the system will take care of itself" and the belief that "white culture is supposed to be the one on top".

So now the world is going to shit, EU and US (ie "the west") is panicking now. The rest of the world is starting to take over in technology, science and other things.

So what is the solution that people has decided? Fascism!

The other (for OG nazi it was socialist then jews then eastern europeans but today it is muslims then immigrants then people of color) is destroying our (read white colonialist) values so "we must use force against our enemy", "we must be not be soft", "it is the woke left mafia that is helping the other" so on and so forth...

epstein class. they are always the reason for shittification of the world. always

It started with the War on Terror of the 2000s destabilizing the Middle East and leading to an influx of refugees into Europe. White supremacists naturally freaked out when they saw more than one brown person, so this started an anti-immigrant sentiment which only continued to build throughout the years. Couple that with funding from rich white supremacists and propaganda from foreign agents like Steve Bannon, and here we are.

The insanity of the far left

this will likely be downvoted to hell but it's true

Same thing that happened to the US.

I see a lot of blame on “brainless idiots” or similar labels when discussing this, but I think that’s dismissive of issues many parties seems to be ignoring, or exacerbating, and that the alt-right is pouncing on.

Not everyone who voted Trump is an idiot, and doubling down on that thinking will make the issue worse.

Another is that the far-right parties tend to be “modern” and very social media savvy, whereas establishment centrist parties are out of touch, and campaign in archaic ways. And (from my impression on the outside) the more leftist European parties are prone to disunity and infighting. They don’t benefit from scandal and controversy like the far right does.

The economic injustice, the feeling of hopelessness and representation is the soil, and misinformation and populism the exponentiator.

People vote right against their own interests because they don't know better, because they feel heard, or because they feel that something has to change, or because they're indoctrinated in these views and communities.

The failure of neoliberal capitalism to deliver freedom and equity.

We were told that's what it would bring. But there is an inherent tension between the freedom to grow capital and the freedom of an individual. The wealthy and our legislators chose the former.

And so, people get left behind. They grow bitter and selfish and angry (just as capitalists intend.) Combine that with a lack of education that teaches critical thinking and healthy skepticism (again, purposefully defunded by capitalists, educated proletariat and all that), and you get people primed to hate. Individuals who care nothing for others and a community, only about themselves and how they're affected. And taking on an abstract entity like a corporation or government is much harder for an individual to comprehend. But hating Muhammed next door? Or Hasan? Or Abdul? Or Devonte? Or Reshawn? That's easy, especially when the news networks or their chosen news sources or influencers tell them to. They already look different and speak differently. And the unknown scares the uneducated. (I.e. see the creation of religions.)

There's a lot more to it, but that's a big one.

The predominant online presence of leftist anarchists all but vanished as corporations and social media took root. For a long time the corporate world remained skeptical of the internet. It was "just a fad" that would go away eventually. They started buying everything up, monopolizing, and controlling the narratives.

I have no doubt the fediverse makes them nervous again like they haven't been in years. There are obvious bad actors running around these parts.

Social media