• @ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.world
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    453 months ago

    I’m convinced most people still don’t understand what “all cops are bastards” actually means.

    “bUt My UnClE/dAd/BrOtHeR/fRiEnD iS a CoP” Yeah, now imagine how many situations where they had to bite their tongue and look away because interfering would lose their job.

    Even the “good” cops aren’t really good because even if they try to stop other cops from being bad they’ll be punished. Being a cop is just being in a govt sanctioned gang.

        • @kaffiene@lemmy.world
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          -13 months ago

          Society. And more than just the police. It’s not the people in the police, it’s the society that makes them like that. ACAB makes it sound like the police exist in a vacuum where the politicians and businesses and media and vitersthat create this situation don’t exist.

        • @kaffiene@lemmy.world
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          -23 months ago

          No but what really is helpful is having a slogan that prompts misunderstanding and division every time you use it.

          How the fuck can being clear be “unhelpful circlejerkibg”?

          • @dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            43 months ago

            It’s no secret that the system is shit. We all are victims of capitalism. And it IS traumatizing. However, if half of all retail workers started engaging in corruption and race based violence, we’d say ARWAB. It’s already been established in legalese that police are “agents of the state” and that their only purpose is to protect capital and capital owners. Anyone who thinks that joining the police force is going to help them give back to their community are naive idiots. ACAB.

            • @kaffiene@lemmy.world
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              13 months ago

              If retail workers started engaging in violence I wouldn’t imagine that all retail workers had suddenly become bastards, I would ask wtf is going on systemically to create that outcome.

              • @PsychedSy@sh.itjust.works
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                03 months ago

                All cops use violence to enforce unjust laws. They do it willingly. It’s not that some are violent - ACAB is a reference to bastardry being a necessary trait of someone that becomes a cop.

          • 𝕯𝖎𝖕𝖘𝖍𝖎𝖙
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            33 months ago

            “the system is shit” doesn’t really convey much meaning. it isn’t clear.

            describing why the system is shit, especially to those who watched their beloved family member become “one of the good guys” in the force can be more helpful.

            I called it circlejerking because we (the circle) all know what you mean by “the system is shit”, and it feels good to say because it is true. but to someone outside the circle, we look like a bunch of degenerates, criminal appologists, reverse-racists, etc…

                • @kaffiene@lemmy.world
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                  23 months ago

                  IMO, at best, it identifies a symptom of the issue that requires change. Look, i don’t agree with you about the optics and helpfulness of ACAB but I agree with you that police are a major problem in the US and I’d welcome reform.

  • Hegar
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    423 months ago

    I wish it was a guillotine blade instead of a razor blade.

  • @taiyang@lemmy.world
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    373 months ago

    I wonder I would explain the format given I’m the resident Californian with neighbors who have signs like this. Here’s an example:

    Which itself I think is a riff off a more conservative religious sign. Can’t find the OG, but this made me laugh on Etsy:

    (The stock model photoshopped in is as confused about this as we are, naturally).

    Lastly, this whole hunt got images had me find this, which made me smile.

    https://www.etsy.com/listing/1359743922/in-this-house-we-believe-funny-yard-sign

    Which I give the authentic Etsy link cause fuck those first two people.

  • novamdomum
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    133 months ago

    Hello, here’s all the things I’d like to argue about today.

    • deaf_fish
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      3 months ago

      Yeah this kind of reeks of “I just found about systemic inequality yesterday and now I plan on single-handedly fixing it tomorrow” energy.

      It’s not ideal…

      I guess it’s better than being totally ignorant.

      • @dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        33 months ago

        Consider that not everyone is at the same level of progress in their journey of being unplugged from the matrix. Everyone starts somewhere, and maybe this post gave someone their quote of the year. Encourage radical thinking or post better memes. Be the change, yadda yadda.

        • @dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          23 months ago

          The only infighting is between actual Leftists and tankies who consider themselves leftists but secretly jerk off to pictures of starving Ukrainians. Most Leftists are squarely in the range of DemSoc to Marxist. Lots to agree on.

  • @IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works
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    103 months ago

    I don’t think I’m getting the “money if fake” one. Money is just an IOU that we’ve all agreed on the value of to simplify bartering.

    • synae[he/him]
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      213 months ago

      Sounds like you are exactly getting the “money is fake” one

      • deweydecibel
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        3 months ago

        Right but what point is it trying to make by pointing it out?

        Yes, money is a social construct, but it’s a construct that represents something real, i.e. trade. Without money we’d replace it with something else, but it ultimately comes down to the same thing.

        Like, I can understand the perfect world without landlords or billionaires and so on, but what’s this perfect world look like that has no currency?

        • @LibertyLizard
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          3 months ago

          Typically societies without money historically operated in what’s called a gift economy. Basically most goods were shared amongst the community. However there are very few remaining today.

        • @dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          23 months ago

          Money is fiat currency. Literally a stand in for something with actual value. Money holds no intrinsic value. You can’t eat it, you can’t breathe it or use it in anyway except to trade for things that do have actual intrinsic value. The only thing money allows humans to do is go into debt. That debt has created a society with insane leaps and bounds in innovation, but the cost is that it’s a ponzi scheme that will collapse spectacularly.

          • poVoqA
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            3 months ago

            Only if you treat debt as something absolute that has to be repaid no matter what.

            In reality in many cases debt is written off as impossible to claw back and sold off to unscrupulous debt enforcement companies at a fraction of the nominal value. Who in turn also rarely manage to get the money.

            We as society could simply decide to forget certain types of debt and basically that is what states do via inflation and which historically many societies have done via debt jubilees.

            The book “Debt the first 5000 years” gives good overview on this matter and fiat currencies in general.

    • @AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
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      213 months ago

      I never agreed to it, and the way it’s dispersed only benefits the people that already have too much of it from exploiting other people’s labor.

      • @corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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        -13 months ago

        I never agreed to it, and the way it’s dispersed

        1. You can disagree with giraffes too, to the same effect.

        2. You’re going to hate something because of the way governments distribute the thing it represents? How is that not like hating all water because you had a flood? Hating air because it’s too windy?

        • @AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          You think social constructs are akin to animals and biological imperatives?

          By that strange logic, humans, Manifest Destiny (aka the kill all the natives cause we’re white and want their shit social construct of colonizing Americans), and thirst are all comparable concepts.

          I hate to tell you, but almost every economy that has ever existed has at some point collapsed, just as ours will one day. We can always kill all the giraffes, and we’re sure as shit the type, but I promise you, being thirsty will exist long after our currency and nation are nothing but a dull history lesson or forgotten all together.

          The owners of this system would have you believe it’s invulnerable, absolute, and forever, just like the Roman Emperors of old did.

      • themeatbridge
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        -33 months ago

        OK, let’s say I agree with your reasoning. Do we go back to the barter system?

        • @rockSlayer@lemmy.world
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          183 months ago

          The barter economy is a myth, based on absolutely nothing other than a guy just deciding he was right with no evidence. Indigenous peoples had all sorts of complex, non market, moneyless economies. One of them is known as a gift economy, where there is competition between communities and individuals to give gifts larger than the gift they received before. A modern moneyless economic concept is a library economy: think of libraries, but for everything non-consumable.

          • @unreasonabro@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Produce excess; give it away for bragging rights

            What a glorious world it could be, instead of this colossal fucking piece of shit

          • @spookex@lemmy.world
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            -123 months ago

            I wouldn’t like the library system because it requires you to treat things a certain way.

            If we think of it from the perspective of a book (since we’re talking about libraries here), if I borrow a book from a library, I have to treat it well and return it in a condition that somebody else can read it.

            If I own a book, I can do whatever I want with it, I can burn it as firewood, I can cut out the words that I don’t like from all of the pages, or I can just scribble all over it with a permanent marker, it’s my book after all.

            • @rockSlayer@lemmy.world
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              153 months ago

              A library economy doesn’t mean you can’t own anything. If you want to own something you can make it or check it out indefinitely. For an example of this, let’s think of checking out a phone.

              You’d check it out indefinitely, and you can consider it yours. Since there’s no money or profit incentive, the phones are designed to be durable, easily repairable, and have interoperable parts. Because the library is the means by which we manage the commons, parts are readily available and you can return the broken part (or entire phone) to be recycled and get the replacement.

              • @spookex@lemmy.world
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                -63 months ago

                Then the question is where does the incentive to do it that way and the incentive to innovative come form?

                • Cethin
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                  173 months ago

                  Dude. Capitalism kills innovation. I hate that myth so much. Capitalism is more likely to stifle innovation than create it. The goal of capitalism is profit and nothing else. Innovation requires risk, which could cause a loss of profit, so it’s a last resort. It’s more profitable to hinder your opponents than to create something innovative.

                  Here’s a good breakdown of some of this.

                  For example, much of our innovation in our society comes from research universities. These are, generally, outside of capitalism. They do research and make discoveries for the benefit they bring to society, or sometimes just to improve our knowledge. They don’t do it for profit.

                  Humans like to improve things and to learn things. There’s no need for it to be profitable. Creating a system that prioritizes this is possible, but it isn’t capitalism.

                • @rockSlayer@lemmy.world
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                  143 months ago

                  From competitions, individual interests, passion, necessity, etc. We don’t need money or markets for people to seek innovation. A library steward should also be responsible for automating means of production as best as possible, which would also drive scientific advancement.

              • drphungky
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                13 months ago

                Well I’m sure he’s the only one. This system sounds great.

                • @AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
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                  3 months ago

                  Without considering how your free use however you want effects others?

                  Absolutely.

                  Humans are social animals, hyper-individualism is antisocial.

                  Contrary to what the oligarchs tell you, greed and selfishness are character deficits and personal failings.

                  Not that they haven’t spent the last century propagandizing attempting to rebrand them into virtues like the Orwellian rational self-interest.

                • bane_killgrind
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                  93 months ago

                  If you don’t value the thing for it’s intended function why are you bothering to take one?

                  Also, if you destroy or misplace the thing, there’s no reason to give you different things. If you want another thing, you are going to be made to work for it.

                  There’s always a bellows that needs pumping.

                • Cethin
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                  3 months ago

                  Define “right” in this context please. If you mean legal right, we’re talking about an entirely different system that would have different laws. The rights you have now may not apply. If you mean moral right, what gives you the moral right to consume resources that need not be consumed that could serve others also? Those seem like some pretty horrible morals if that’s what you believe.

        • Hegar
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          The barter system is a myth, it never existed. Not in the ‘I want bricks but only have a sheep and you don’t want a sheep so we both get nothing’ way that it’s taught in highschool econ class.

          Before cash, trade could use items of high constant demand - salt, cacao beans, dried tea, etc. - as a medium of exchange. Maybe you’re fine for salt, but someone will always want more salt. It was also much more common to just rely on debt. Sure, take my extra bricks and when you have something of equivalent value that I want, you discharge your debt.

        • @AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
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          Honestly currency is fine, but not bastardized by the real villain: capital markets. It has made our currency representative of backwards, antisocial values, and in great quantities, proof of how good one is at extracting value from their fellow humans.

          Capital markets have gone from supposedly a means for seed funding for businesses to the final word, despite contributing NO LABOR to the products or services they take almost all the produced profit from. And in our terminal state market capitalism, they’re eating one another and playing economic tricks for short term cash grabs they enforce on companies through threats of lawsuit, breaking entire economic sector’s ability to make the products/services they literally existed to provide in the process. LABOR makes the world run, grows the food, makes the discoveries, capital investment just takes all the fruits and leaves a few crumbs.

          We’re going to collapse, but if we cared, we’d remake our economy that rewards cooperatives and punishes corporations, and capital investment would receive a small fraction of what labor produces instead of the opposite as it is today.

          And yes, going back to a barter system would be better than this. We might even still be able to breathe above ground in 50 years.

          • @IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works
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            13 months ago

            if we cared, we’d remake our economy

            I know this is going to be necessary, but I’m selfish enough to hope it happens after I get old and die. I really don’t want to have to live through the violent revolution it will take for that to actually get done.

            • @AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              A least you’re more honest than the relatively small class of benefactors of this corrupted economy who don’t even acknowledge that, being supported by skilled laborers at every level of profit and life, but truly self-deluding themselves and others into believing they earned and should have society/politics/media warping levels of wealth. Reward good ideas and harder work yes, but within reason.

              Are we a civilization or not? I want us to be.

      • @IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works
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        -53 months ago

        That’s a function of power, not money. Even if you magically made the concept of money disappear, there will still be people who find a way to gather power over other people.

        • Hegar
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          113 months ago

          But money is much easier to amass in larger amounts for all time than say cacao beans. A perfect world is not possible, but a better world is very possible.

    • @j_robyOPM
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      3 months ago

      I see what you’re trying to say. But I gotta ask tho: did “we all” actually, really agree on that?

      • @IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works
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        -73 months ago

        Yes. We have all agreed to exchange tokens (which have little to no inherent value) for goods and services, in lieu of trading other goods and services directly.

        All other mechanics surrounding money are up for debate, but for any society more advanced than the hunter-gatherer stage, some form of “money” is required to facilitate trade.

      • Annoyed_🦀 🏅
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        -93 months ago

        If you ever use money to buy the thing with the price agreed upon, then yes, you agree on that. This is sovciv level post…

          • @AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
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            There’s a significant difference between recognizing the irredeemable, systemic corruption of this economy, and believing no society or economy should exist ever.

            The former wants a just, equitable society, and recognizes this is the opposite of that, and the latter just openly wishes they could shoot their way through life with impunity.

            • @DerisionConsulting@lemmy.ca
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              03 months ago

              When you say “I never agreed to it” as a retort to a comment that boils down to “I think that money is real”, you are either using the same logic and talking points of a Sovcit.

              Maybe you are just wording things poorly, but you sound like a Sovcit.

              • @dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                33 months ago

                Sovcits are gullible fools that think that saying incantations to police about moving vs travelling will somehow make them immune to the law. They generally have nothing to say about the application of money as they still attend jobs and bring home incomes.

    • uphillbothways
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      53 months ago

      Problem is the majority of money is tied up overseas and in shit like the stock exchange, the insurance market, crazy real estate speculation and various other investments. If any decent portion of that gets leveraged back into material goods everyone trying to simply live is suddenly poor as fuck and starving to death. The value of money is based on so many assumptions it’s unsound.

      Not that you’re wrong in practice, but there’s nothing at guaranteeing that practice is stable and people’s lives depend on that very stability.

    • @milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
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      33 months ago

      Careful with that thinking there, mister. Soon enough you’ll be rederiving civilisation and suggesting things like power structures and statutory social order.

    • @unreasonabro@lemmy.world
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      the origin of the idea is that since you can no longer simply go exchange your money for its equivalence in actually valuable metals, you can’t expect prices to be based on the value of their material components and labour any more. Money is no longer a promisory note for gold. Admittedly, that logic is a little iffy, and yet the threat has come true:

      the more updated version of that is to simply go to any big store and look at the prices - say, $65 for a DVI to HDMI signal converter - and see that price has been divorced from the real value of products in favor of capitalist bullshit like artificial scarcity and the total enshittification of society, which i daresay has already been achieved.

  • DessertStorms
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    If I had any talent at all I would 100% make a fabulous looking embroidery of this to hang in my house…

    E: also I love how this has gotten so many people to openly declare both their ignorance and determination to maintain it, in their refusal to look up a topic that has been written about extensively for centuries and actually educate themselves, instead of confidently and incorrectly declaring something they know nothing about wrong or impossible or whatever capitalism has indoctrinated them to believe about its alternatives…

  • @Treefox@lemmy.ml
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    33 months ago

    The only billionaire I have even the slightest bit of respect for is Mark Cuban cause he actually tries to make people’s lives a little easier.

    Everyone else can bite bricks and or be stripped of their wealth cause they are wasting it.

    • @j_robyOPM
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      03 months ago

      Give it some time. He’s helping people at the moment with his current business model. But his model really seems like he’s just moving to corner the market. Once he has cornered enough of that market, his true colors will show.

      You don’t amass that kind of wealth by being altruistic.

  • The Pantser
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    13 months ago

    This really needs a part about how all churches are scams to bilk you out of your money.

  • snownyte
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    03 months ago

    I can’t get behind all cops are bastards.

    I’ve watched so many police bodycam videos by now to say that anyone who gets caught red-handed for their criminal bullshit, are the ones who’d be screaming about how all cops are bastards.

    I’ll trade all cops are bastards for religion is a business.

  • @doctorcrimson@lemmy.world
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    -23 months ago

    I think the vast majority of landlords are parasites, but definitely not all.

    You think every single person should be entitled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of property on loan? Some grown ass adults out there struggle to tie their shoelaces because they’re still holding their crack pipe. Landlords are the vehicle by which the needy gain access to housing in capitalism, they’re a symptom and not a disease. Fix capitalism (with socialism) and the symptom will disappear.

    • @j_robyOPM
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      103 months ago

      Found the landlord.

    • @dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      83 months ago

      You’re framing the issue all wrong. Money is fake. Housing is necessary to live. Maybe everyone should just have a house and we shouldn’t commodify a necessity to living. Same with food and water. Anyone who profiteers off of a life necessity is a parasite.

      • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
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        43 months ago

        Who’s going to gather the lumber, pour the foundation, frame the house, mine the copper, install the electrical wiring, and all that shit? It sounds nice to say “maybe everyone should just have a house”, but houses don’t grow out of the ground. It takes considerable manpower, knowledge, skill, and resources to build a house. The people involved in that process deserve & require compensation. You can debate if it’s best to receive that compensation through a socialist system where they receive other goods and services in exchange, a communist system where everyone labors and receives according to state distribution, or through our current capitalist system, but it’s naive to say “just give everyone a house”.

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
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      23 months ago

      You’re getting torn apart - I think partially because of your phrasing - but you make a valid point. There are a lot of people without the knowledge, ability, resources, or even desire to own a house. “Just give everyone a house” is a childish sentiment that fails to acknowledge the complexities of the real world.

      • @doctorcrimson@lemmy.world
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        23 months ago

        I’m not feeling “torn apart” in the slightest, most reasonable responses have been very much in agreement with me while dissenting views have been mostly ad hominem or baseless accusation.

        • @MrMakabar
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          33 months ago

          I thought you were genuinly argueing that landlords keep crackheads of the street. Should have been more forgiving.