herrcaptain

Well, I've favorited you here on Lemmy and will make sure to keep in touch. I wasn't sure there was a DM feature, but looking in my app it appears there is, so I'll do that in the coming days to check in.

No glowing trees in my dreams, but a good sleep nonetheless so thanks for that!

You as well, my dude! And for the record, you seem very likable to me. Please do feel more than welcome to reach out if you ever need a friendly ear. I often feel powerless in the world, but one thing I am capable of is acting as a sounding board for someone who needs to vent. As I said in another comment earlier today, I'm pretty pessimistic about the state of the world, so these days I focus on just helping people where I can.

I definitely recognize that video! I'm sure I saw it on Ebaums World or something way back before YouTube.

As to your comment itself - don't worry about being "too much" with me, especially after that info dump I fired at you. Many of us at my work struggle with mental illness and joke about how blatantly we trauma-dump on each other all the time. Sooooo, I'm used to it, and regularly perpetrate it myself. I've also been through two full-on mental breakdowns myself so not a lot can shock me.

It's late and I need some sleep but if you ever need a friendly ear to vent to, add me on Mastodon ( @[email protected] ) or straight up shoot me an email ( [email protected] ). I skimmed some of your comment history and you seem like a good egg and we have a lot of common ground for a friendship.

I'm truly glad I was able to help you have a nicer day. We all need to look out for each other and prop our friends (current or future) up in this system rigged against us.

I'm with you in that most of the population are comparatively poor. The problem is that the oligarchs know exactly how to keep us down, by playing our minor differences off against each other. We need a whole lot of love and understanding to counter that power.

I mean, I'm so goddamn fortunate compared to like 95% of the earth's population. I grew up fairly poor to working-class parents who had to really struggle to provide for us and keep a roof over our heads. But poor in Canada is a whole world's difference from poor (or even doing okay) in most other places, and I include the USA in that latter category.

I'm now nearing 40 and for the first time in my life I don't have to outright directly stress about money. My wife and I are lower-middle-class, and along with the rest of my family were able to buy the business we all worked for. It's still a struggle - now I have to worry about keeping the business afloat for everyone who depends on it, and we had to make a lot of sacrifices to make this happen. (It's still up in the air whether my mom, the president of our company, will be able to retire in time to enjoy it.) That said, part of the reason we could make this happen was because we had my wife's family to fall back on and have "temporarily" been living rent-free in their basement for 9 years now. This is something else that so many other people lack. I can't remember the technical term for it, but having a family or other social network to lift you up is so crucial to keeping people out of poverty or otherwise helping them better their lives.

This is getting stupidity long-winded, but the point I'm getting at is that for the first time in my life I have the potential to become very wealthy over the next few decades. However, myself and my family are in full agreement that we don't want that. As our business becomes less of a struggle we certainly want to pay ourselves a little better (with our skills and experience we could make far more anywhere else than we can currently afford to pay ourselves), but we want to raise the wages of our staff right along with our own - never making much more than the average person we employ. To us, that's the real mark of business success - creating a thriving organization that lifts up everyone involved.

We've all seen what egregious wealth can do to a person and want no part in it. If our business does well enough to potentially make us rich, I want us to be taxed punitively- to properly incentivize us to reinvest our profits into creating more jobs and paying them increasingly well. To get rich would be the death of who we are as people.

With this all being said, all of us who want to make the world better in spite of the egregious power of the rich need to stick together. Leftism is so prone to infighting over minute technical details when we ultimately all want the same core things. I'm certainly critical of certain strains of leftism, but at the end of the day I have way more in common with ya'll than I do with the rich. (In fairness, my family technically owns some of the means of production, but the tiny sliver we own is worth less than a typical house in our low cost-of-living area and we don't own houses because of it. As such, I think the worst we could be accused of is being petite bourgeoisie.)

The rich, on the other hand, possess a remarkable class consciousness. A white warehouse worker has far more in common with a black supermarket worker than a Saudi Sheik has with an American or Russian oligarch, but you'd never know it. They've gotten so good at playing us against each other while cooperating to keep us all down. It's a tale as old as time.

I like this but I can see them leaning into it and taking it as a badge of honor.

I see where you're coming from but that feels dangerously close to a certain other word I'd rather not use. I'm also not sure of the etemology of that word, but I wouldn't be shocked to find out it has something in common with the other one.

I've been trying my best for a while now, friend. I'm also trying to normalize treating having too much wealth as embarrassing. Like, it should fully be seen as a character flaw to have more money than anyone could ever use. I'm far from advocating for enforced equality, but there should be some limit to wealth upon which exceeding it is viewed as gross by the rest of us plebs. Those parasites certainly shouldn't be fawned over like so many people do now.

Thanks! Their story is interesting in and of itself (in its problematic way suited to the era), but I do try to give it my own flair.

From what I remember from writing an undergrad history paper on these dudes, it was used for lots of things such as a treatment for chlamydia (or another STI - I don't remember exactly). These dudes were banging their way across America, especially the black slave they brought along as apparently the locals thought he had big magic.

I'm not condoning any of this sort of colonialism - just clarifying that these dudes probably single-handedly introduced some new STIs to whole populations, and they were dragging their leaky mercury-riddled dicks along in their boats.

It's weird how in the Western world we rarely call them oligarchs. That seems to be reserved for the wealth-hoarders in former-Soviet countries.

True. Most of us are too paranoid or anti-social. (Including myself, to a fair degree.)

Likewise. Though judging from the Lemmy community for my province and it's biggest city, maybe 3 people would show up.