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Reminder: Ayn Rand died on public assistance.

They’re only for freedom to gouge for water at the only source for a hundred miles when they believe they’ll be the ones holding the ladle.

This is a good example of the “If you regulate/tax business, they’ll just leave and you’ll be sorry!” Ayn Rand fallacy.

All this means is that their business model was to gouge consumers, and being barred from gouging cheap internet for their poorest customers revealed that they were (and still are everywhere else) bad faith, dishonest, antisocial actors that have no interest in providing products and services for a reasonable margin.

Just as with any business that would exit a market, or billionaire that would leave the country to prevent taxation back into the commons that facilitated their wealth accumulation to begin with (a preliterate workforce, roads and utilities they disproportionately degrade with heavy use, etc) you demonstrate that you work against your own customers and your own people, so by all means, gtfo.

Our oligarchs want us to compete to the death for their ever dwindling relative to inflation and productivity scraps, but they’ve grown too powerful to tolerate competition themselves.

Not when they’ve gone to all the trouble of normalizing monopolies and duopolies at home.

Hurry up! We need moar economic metastasis!

This planet isn’t going to incinerate itself 🔥🔥🔥

That is just sad.

Our capitalist’s Greed, avarice, the desire to treat their countrymen as livestock so they can live as modern pharoahs on our back and the willingness to bribe their own regulators and capture the government with their capital (power) they’re only supposed to have a single vote in is why the government treats us as livestock.

It’s ridiculous you think China made our owner class act as murderous sociopaths in order to amass their ridiculous hoards.

The CCP had nothing to do with our for profit healthcare insurance sector murdering their own customers, our citizens with the approval of both parties, when they become inconvenient to private profit as just one of countless examples. China has their own sins, that isn’t one of them.

We are the primary vector destabilizing governments and waging wars to expand our greed disease around the world to keep resources and markets open to our capitalist’s exploitation because it’s never fucking enough. No one forced us into that. Our owners just demanded moar.

If you want Americans to be loyal, establish social and economic equity. Until then, don’t expect the tortured masses to thank or appreciate their torturers, let alone have loyalty to them. That’s just Stockholm syndrome.

I consider the domestic powers that be to be hostile to people of low net worth, aka most of the people they govern, so there’s that.

When your own society treats you like a disposable capital battery that will gladly kill you when it finally breaks you, like by denying your necessary healthcare in a vast insurance confidence scheme, it’s strange to expect allegiance.

The United States is very clear that we’re on our own, “free” to die in the streets. I find it strange that some Americans take offense to other Americans taking their business elsewhere.

I hear what you’re saying, and yeah all communities have a narrative, I’ve been reprimanded on L/climate for the exact opposite, questioning where all the unearned optimism was coming from.

But the format is topics, and you do need to fit the topics, so I get it based on the community. That said, what I cannot stand is someone’s opinion being elevated on the basis of them being a celebrity, or an influencer. I prefer not to consume content through the prism of knowing of the person who said it. If Kim Kardashian has something she thinks is clever to say, let her say it without her name behind it to see if it sinks or swims on whether people read the comment and found it clever/relevant/worth propagating with an upvote or not.

I explained it to my friends about why I only used Reddit and now Lemmy:

I think social media attached directly to Ego is toxic and harmful. On more anonymous social media, ideas(content) at least tends to rise or fall on their own merits, rather than on the prior popularity of the individual saying them.

I’m here for cool ideas, concepts, and discussions, not popularity contests which most social media platforms are.

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Capitalists are more efficient than both.

They don’t see almost anyone as human.

Agreed on all counts my friend, and best of luck to you as well.

From my perspective, being disloyal to my country’s attempts to monopolize the information I imbibe, and being counted as part of that mass movement directly is again more important than also rejecting receiving the social media of another evil empire that, again, would simply be seen as patriotism/nationalism/nothing at all. It doesn’t actually meaningfully benefit China, but it does very publicly, as a movement of people not just me, work as a demonstration of undermining the authority of the evil empire I do have some tiny insignificant influence in.

They’ll ban it of course, and there will be another one. And that continuous “We don’t respect you or your authority because you arent on our side” does over time diminish the misplaced faith some still have in our captured institutions. Unfortunately signing up for Lemmy over reddit’s greed or some scandanavian social media doesn’t send the same message.

It has to be an enemy evil empire for the powerful of our evil empire to take notice and be concerned at all. Otherwise, it’s akin to “protesting” with a permit at a designated protest zone out of the eyeline and profit operations of those you’re protesting, aka masturbation.

China is and has committed genocide.

The US is and has committed genocide.

That’s not a point in either’s favor. That’s a moral wash.

I’d rather both nations failed, so something more humane can potentially take its place (and revolution over and over until that happens) but as an American, rejecting China means nothing, just as a Chinese citizen rejecting America means nothing.

Rejecting evil empires begins with undermining the one that you’re expected to support and be a loyal cog of. A Russian openly hating America or a Chinese person openly hating Russia is indistinguishable from patriotism/nationalism.

I can only hurt one empire materially, the one I materially live within. The Chinese have to reign in China, and the Russians Russia. The best I can do is my part not to strengthen or support the evil empire I was born under to the best of my ability.

Not with a ten meter cattle prod for me, anyone willing to indulge Zuck’s midlife Nazi crisis deserves him.

Why should I care about who the US sees as the enemy? I was born here and I’m seen as nothing more than livestock for our capitalists, when they aren’t funding and supplying a genocide against poors halfway around the world.

No way I’m going to rejoin Metabook after 10 years now that they’ve gone full Nazi.

Downloaded Rednote. Cool app. Fuck the hometeam that chose to be the opposite of a society. It’s only the home team if it’s a team, it’s been made clear to most Americans that we’re just a bunch of rugged individuals at each other’s throats for oligarch scraps and we can get fucked and die to profit healthcare scammers.

I’d rather have my clicks profit our supposed enemy than us at this point with “friends” like my country.

I could totally see Gandalf still being in middle Earth. He cared about his mission because he fell in love with middle Earth. Had he not been elevated to Gandalf the White explicitly to compete his task reminding him he doesn’t belong there, I could very much see him having gone the way of Radagast, being a force for good in middle Earth for a long time.

Saruman, for all his faults, was correct, Gandalf’s love of the haflings and the good of middle earth was making him complacent.

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Would goblins/orcs still have endured without the lingering evil of Sauron?

They weren’t naturally occurring (yes they bred but they were made to be a breeding army for evil and I’m pretty sure Tolkien alluded them to dying out quickly after the ring was destroyed) in Tolkien’s lore I’m pretty sure and were interchangable terms for the same species in his lore even though they’re different in others.

Boring movie series then.

…and Gandalf the Grey spent 3 weeks drinking and smoking and setting off fireworks with the Hobbits, remembering his old friend Bilbo who died some years earlier after an average hobbit lifespan with his nephew Frodo…

THE END