He had to relinquish his title! The horror! Have you no sympathy?

They find talking points and demonize anyways.

Fascism is stupid.

I mean, all of what one might construe as benefits of fascism would be better served otherwise: strengthening your country, a sense of belonging, public order…

You’ll experience a much stronger sense of belonging if you don’t push your neighbors to hate you because you’ve arbitrarily decided to hate them and support doing bad things to them.

Letting armed thugs arbitrarily arrest people is not public order, quite the opposite.

Countries which have fully embraced fascism never stayed strong for very long and lost quite a lot in the process. This is when they were ever strong in the first place.

And I’m not even going to talk about the even more blatant lies (family values, moral righteousness, upholding traditions…)

Yeah whatever… I scrolled through both your and his comments… (some of it - I’d take your word that I missed out the juicy bits, but it would help if you explained in clear language what I should be looking for)

So yeah, I’m not really sure what you’re on about. Sure, there seems to be some dubious (IMHO) takes here and there from both of you. Then again, I’m sure I could find some of my own comments to be rather dubious when taking them out of context.

Besides, if I may offer some advice, combining a very adversarial posture, altcaps as a cheap way to pastiche op, and an inability to clearly communicate what your grief with op is in the first place really doesn’t help make your point.

Now, in the light of what little I’ve seen of your comments, I’m guessing op has been advocating abstaining in your last presidential election due to the ongoing US-supported genocide in Palestine. I understand you are pissed off about that, I fail to see how going on a witch hunt after the fact, badmouthing op on every comment in a post that has nothing to do with that issue is achieving anything. Especially when the post is just some rather mild news article with no commentary from OP himself. Especially when you make it really hard to understand what you are on about.

This infighting between you non-MAGA Americans, while fascism is sweeping through your country, is quite ridiculous at this point. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to settle the scores if you succeed in getting out of this mess, and in the meanwhile, we all have much bigger problems to worry about than who did what in 2024.

I’m not really sticking out my neck for op, I frankly don’t care. I’m sticking it out to keep lemmy a place for sane and constructive exchanges and discussions.

Just to be sure that we are on the same page:

• we have op (return2ozma) posting a news article.
• the title of the post is the title of the article, which is pretty good practice when relaying a news article on social media.
• the title of the post quotes a question asked by B. Sanders.
• what you know of op makesyou claim that he asks the question in bad faith.
• I remark op isn’t the one asking the question.
• I add that it’s a rhetorical question.

Now to answer your last comment, what I was getting at with my second point, and which is maybe not that all pertinent in hindsight, is that it’s kind of hard to make out from a rhetorical question alone what the author ‘s stance might actually be exactly. Maybe Sanders thinks that the extent of Musk’s donations might suggest the US not being a true democracy, maybe he thinks that this is in contradiction with an otherwise healthy democracy, maybe he thinks there’s nothing democratic about the current US political system ; or any shade between these. All in all, the conclusion is left to the reader.

In light of all this, the fact that op could be a bad actor is not very pertinent : it’s not his words, and even if it was, the nature of the question and its effect on the reader is quite open ended and IMO not as manipulative as « bad faith » would imply.

Edit: the important point being that op is not the author of the question. The rhetorical question remark was first and foremost there to point it out in case you missed it.

Fun idea, unfortunately what empowers those corporations, besides the system they thrive in, is the fact that they have immense wealth commandeered by a select few, not their sole legal status.

Couldn’t agree more.

However, yea, votes don’t count on an individual basis, that’s inherent to any decision making system that evenly splits decision making power between thousands of people of not millions (if not billions if you’d even hope for an actual world wide democracy)

That’s even the whole point of it. And no, I don’t mean that in the sense of how liberal democracies with unbridled capitalism make the average vote/voice meaningless compared to what a billionaire can achieve by spending only the tinyest fraction of his wealth. Indeed, a true democracy would and should make the individual vote/voice of any individual by theirselves meaningless, and that should include billionaires, self-serving autocrats and what not.

Actshually the question is asked by Sanders.

Of course it’s clearly some kind of rhetorical question.

Certainly not doing himself no, but don’t you think he’s petty enough to supervise the whole thing start to finish ?

Billionaires will not starve no, however you’d be naive to think that billionaires are content as long as they don’t starve.

Billionnaires need to be getting richer at an ever increasing pace to actually be content. That’s how you become a billionaire in the first place.

Billionaires don’t want serious damage to the economy as that’s not going to help them getting richer, quite the contrary. Just like strikers will give in when continuing means that they will starve, billionaire will give in before their profits and assets take a serious hit (or will do what it take to get the people in charge to give in)

Hey sorry for the belated reply. Please note that I didn’t downvote you.

I suppose first we have to clear up the meaning of ´tanking’ the economy, for me it means long term damage that takes time to recover, if recoverable in the first place. Of course, a general strike will not be a net positive in itself.

However, let’s not forget that, if met, the demands of the strikers, could potentially be beneficial to the economy. (They could also be detrimental of course). But we have to consider the overall effect, and that is a lot more complex than just considering « oh no people are not going to be working for days or weeks ».

I’m not sure you believe that leaving the Trump admin free rein is actually beneficial to the economy…

Besides the thing about striking is that people don’t get paid, so companies might not be making money, but their losses won’t be so great, especially in a high income country such as the us where salaries are not dirt cheap. Most of the remaining expenses would be : rent, loans if applicable and any materials or product that has to be consumed in a given time frame, and goes bad unused because of the strike. The latter is the only real loss to the economy, as it is literally wasting stuff. Loans can be renegotiated and rent can be spread out. Not that this can’t have adverse effects… of course people are going to loose money - that’s kind of the whole point. Profits will probably take a hit (ohno, extremely rich people are going to enrich themselves slightly less for a while, what a terrible thing !!)

If ever a company goes under because of a strike, this leaves room for a new one to take its place (or an existing company to expand), especially in an economy as flexible as the US. So it might be bad in the short term for some people, but failures such as these can be recovered from quickly.

But anyways, the thing is with strikes is that the people in charge ALWAYS give in before serious damage is done. Nobody is going to leave their company go bankrupt because workers are striking, just like nobody is going to strike until they starve to death (hunger strikes set aside which are a whole different thing and not what we are discussing).

Of course a nationwide strike is a different business, but if it goes on to a point where many companies are going to go under, it means that many important people are loosing money. They will put pressure to resolve the crisis and will do so before irreversible damage is done because it is in their fucking interest to do so and most of these people care about money first.

Anyways, they have been many strikes, general or not, throughout the world and throughout history, I challenge you to find one example where these have caused irreversible damage to the economy.

The fact is they damage from strikes is extremely short term and is always recovered from quickly, because only fanatics would have it otherwise. They might be a lot of fanatics at the head of the US atm, but they need the support of a lot of people who will always favor their profits and business over everything else.

Democracy isn’t just about what (a short) majority of the voters have decided, it’s also about checks and balances, and protection of the individual, especially those from minority groups… and a lot more. There is nothing democratic about Trump’s rule and the fact that 52 or 53 or whatever percent of those citizens who went to actually cast a ballot voted for this doesn’t change that fact

Edit: Also, a general strike is not going to « tank the economy »