Gray Champion Predictions

[Eric the Green]

(03-20-2022, 02:22 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:

(03-20-2022, 03:05 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Our lack of civil responsibility is due to belief in the neoliberal ideology that we can just let the free market operate and the invisible hand will create utopia. And therefore we don't need any compassionate solutions, but just rely upon ourselves. We are due for a correction all right-- after 40 years of this "masculine" self-reliance, we need to return to caring for our society and our planet too or we won't have either. It seems to me politicians and people in general have plenty of resolve. It's where they employ it that is the problem. It's about a few people with great resolve wanting more wealth and power for themselves and less for everyone else, and deceiving people that if we all think that way, then we'll all succeed, or else that solutions just trickle down from those few "job creaters".

You're thinking more of the Gilded Age than the present era of borrow-and-spend addiction to meaningless shiny commodities and resorting to escalating emotional antics to be heard. Capitalism is not solely a masculine ideology, much less a solely male one (think Ayn Rand), and this is evident when you look at ratios of consumer spending of men vs women.

I am thinking of today, not the Gilded Age. Capitalism is not solely a masculine ideology, in the sense that women go shopping, but capitalism per se is a masculine ideology because it emphasizes competition and self-reliance ideals. George Monbiot made that point in his discussion of neoliberalism. Have you seen that video? It is perfectly possible for women like Rand and Thatcher to believe in this masculine ideology. "Escalating emotional actics" are not the problem with our society, although lack of decorum seems to be a trend. The problem with our society resides in which decisions are being made about power and wealth, and who gets to make them.

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Quote:Can you really make out such evaluations based on your personal personality preferences? Sorry, but rich bosses these days need to be bossed around, and that's what AOC and other progressives offer.

Good luck trying to boss around billionnaires, investment bankers and entrepreneurs. People who go into those professions do so precisely because they are acutely aware that everyone wants to "boss them around" and take their shit. They've all been preparing for decades, and if comes to war, there's will not the lives sacrificed. Vilifying financial success is not our antidote here.

People who go into those professions do so because of the wealth and power it confers upon them. To say anything else is as Nick Nanauer might say, either a distraction or a lie. Financial success often deserves to be vilified today, because today it is mostly ill-gotten. Not always; I don't doubt there's an important place for entreprenuers and success. I don't see our society today as placing any limits on this, or that such a limit is somehow "a problem." Rich bosses these days need to be bossed around, and what I mean by that should be more than obvious. We need to return to when regulations and higher taxes were imposed upon them by our democracy, according to the needs of today; taxes and regulations which neoliberalism has made impossible.