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I'd say the biggest losers are the dead. With a Bataclan everyday in France, a Lockerbie in the UK and 2/3 of a 9/11 everyday for the US, it's a humanitarian disaster. I think that shouldn't be forgotten, even as we talk about economy. There's blood on our hands as a society.

Anyway, from what I've glanced at progressive internet, I'm of the opinion that a lot of small business losses are warranted (whether or not they're deserved). Both from a management and market viewpoint.

Small businesses that worked like petty tyrannies, who demanded sacrifice from workers whom they would give no lotalty in return are losing workers. Most worker turnover has had the behavior of their immediate bosses as the top cause, and to defend the big companies, I've seen and experienced more abuses from small business with a nebulous work culture than larger offices.

Market wise? Instead of efficiency, resilience is the word of the day, and bigger groups can take hits without folding. We're going to see even more disruptions in the future (environmental, health, maybe even political) and if small businesses can't function under stress, they need to be replaced otherwise local communities will suffer for it.

I fear monopolies and oligopolies, because they make sense. Some markets trend towards those states without intervention.

Devil's advocate:

To defend the small businesses, there's also a tendency for the "small bourgeois" to be the first targets in a revolt. In 'Germinal' it's the shop owner who's been raising the price of bread who gets killed by miners, not the mine owners. It's why the small business owners need to invest in the community for social stability, while the very rich don't. Or why small buisiness pays for the popular anger that should have been directed at big government or buisiness.

Just a sad tendency, but not one that should be forgotten. Especially when a lot of rich manipulate the fear of being attacked to turn the middle and lower class against each other.

I really like Germinal by the way. I think about it a lot while seeing recent news.

It's about miners who live in desperate circumstances, who die due to the greed and apathy of those above, and who try to live their lives through it. A migrant worker eventually gets them to revolt after a spark is lit, with a riot of extreme violence (this is the point where the shopkeeper is killed) that ends with the miners being gunned down and suppressed by police and the army. In the end, the miners go back to work, even worse off than before, but the agitator survives and the undercurrent is that no issues were fixed, so it will happen again.

It's humanized of course, the miners brutalize each other as well, but they have their families and moments of sadness and happiness. The shopkeeper is struggling as well, the soldiers and police are brutes and tools, but they're also terrified. The owners are prejudiced, apathetic or naive at best, but they're disconnected and learn nothing apart from a brief brush with terror.

SUMMARY: Despair, despair, despair.

Redesigns are a capitalist distraction that serve as the new opium of the masses, a balm for a broken system. Lip-service to the ideals of democracy to mask the unholy fusion of the ideals of equality and human rights with unequal quasi-sociopathic exploitation of men.

Also, I prefer Maltesers.

A porn video featuring Tifa from FF7 got shown in the Italian Senate.

This counts as politics.

#yas kween corporation slay

you do realize what he said is correct right?

I hate how we are all often just puppets of greedy rich people, I may be wrong on this but this feels manufactured this time like they want us to fight about this shit, they want us to fight over green M&Ms and other "woke" products for and against them it gets them money and free publicity.

It is hard for me to be optimistic about the future when everyone's fate is constantly being influenced by the latest scheme of some rich asshole

This isn't even exclusively a capitalism problem so many problems and corruption in governments are also caused by some asshole wanting money. So many problems in the world directly related to someone wanting as much money as possible, it really sucks but that is life I guess

Pointing out that the woke M&Ms are a bare-faced marketing campaign, weaponizing people's outrage at dumb bullshit to get free advertisement, and potentially serves as a distraction from accusations of child labor levied at the parent company means you're "real mad". We've really reached Twitter levels of stupid takes, huh?

The Tifa thing was distracting, would have otherwise responded sooner.

Seriously though, I just googled it. Are M&Ms an actual controversy?

I was being a bit facetious, since I had spent two posts on a quasi-communist rant.

Hasn't it always been?

Exactly
the elites always turn the masses for them by pretending to care about morals like progressivism or tradition, or turn them against the intellectuals, foreigners, or just each other

From a marketing point of view it's a win win.
If you're someone who doesn't care but still like M&Ms you won't be affected.
If you're someone who's gung ho about social justice stuff – which all too many brands want to sell to (because the underlying secret that the social justice types are frequently from financial classes that have a lot of disposable money), you're going to get even more eager to buy your product.
And if you're someone who's going to get offended by this change, you may not buy the product, but you will create the kind of outrage that keeps the brand talked about for way longer than it ought to be.
No matter how you want to slice it…So much of our media, so much of our culture, no matter where you are on the political or cultural compass, it is fueled, and fueling outrage. I dare say, anger and outrage is the dejure emotion for us to have. Is that anger justified? In many cases it is. But it is the emotion that is literally fueling our cultural, economic, political and intellectual discourse today.

Yeah I agree I hate my economy it makes me doubt if globalization was a good thing, having all this corporations gaining so much power and controlling world culture negatively. I ain't a fan of our capitalistic globalized world but I don't know if there is any good alternative

Funny thing is, I'm sure we'll disagree about who and what is responsible for the lack of solidarity, but the bit about everything falling apart is a common point.

I have to ask however, do you actually care for your fellow countrymen, in this case the democrats? Or the Independents, or whoever isn't even enmeshed in the political machine? What happens, in the hypothetical scenario where the system fails and you're all left picking up the pieces?

I'm asking, because anecdotally lot of the French and British populists I knew had confused messaging at best, and at worst they were hypocrites or assholes. 'We all have to work together' doesn't seem to be a message that gets through, if anything I think we're all more divided than when the anti-globalist backlash started.

I used to be angrier about American Republicans, because of their anti-foreigner thing, but as time goes on I've found out that (to not be too stereotypical) a lot of Americans can't place countries they have dealings with on a map. People pay more attention to the US than the reverse, and foreigners are just an abstraction to them. A way to get at their 'true enemy': the other party.

I am British, not American and I had the same anti foriegner view on republicans for a long time, unbeknownst to me all my news of the nation was coming from pro democrat news oulets and the only opposing views permitted to jump the pond were the ones that reinforced the party line.

I would probably still be so deluded had they not pulled the same propaganda games on us during the brexit years as they have the republicans. The issue had my wrapped attention and I was seeing things in the morning with my own eyes only for the media report the exact opposite by dinner.

Made me question everything they had been telling me for 20 years; didnt take much digging to start seeing how prone to deciet and collusion the field of journalism actually is. 6 years later and it has only ever gotten worse.

My constant negativity isnt really helping so one thing I am more optimistic about: the internet is probably slowly becoming a nicer place.

Sure its still super toxic but I would argue three or four years ago it was more toxic.

Irl people aint getting nicer but at least the internet might be.

Globalization can be a good thing, depending on where you are looking at it from. If you're a country that suddenly is receiving new capital investment into industry from foreign companies, and experiencing massive wage growth like China did, then you'd be on the positive end of it. If you're the one who's industry is being exported to a poorer nation with lax labor laws, you'd stand to lose big time. And that's exactly what happened in the US. The problem was the rapid way globalization happened in the late 80s and 90s created massive socio-economic problems that erupted in the late 2000s, and weren't properly dealt with leading to someone like Trump to be elected. It was too rapid, it was too sudden, and it didn't care about the ones being left behind. Because, in the end, the ones being left behind weren't in the majority.

I also agree with Greyblades about the cost of globalization to nations. In The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart, he describes, broadly, two groups in British politics: anywheres and somewheres. The first group contains urban, mobile, relatively young, wealthy, and highly educated elites of various ethnicities. The second comprises older, more sedentary, poorer, and less educated provincials, almost all of whom are white. “Anywheres” dominate elite education, the financial services industry, major media outlets, and the government technocracy--all of which are clustered in and around London. “Somewheres,” by contrast, are spread throughout the rest of the United Kingdom, where they seek in vain to defend local traditions, national identity, and what they conceive of as decent lower- and middle-class family values.

This can be very broadly applied to modern US politics as well. The "anywheres" do dominate cultural and academic institutions. But they are also part of a particular economic class who's industries are not particularly localized. They can choose to move to another state or country for a job, and often are willing to. They subscribe to an internationalist point of view where borders are much less meaningful, and the fabric of home identity, belonging to somewhere is blase. The "somewheres" in the US live in mostly suburban and rural areas, they have particular connection to where they live, and take extra pride in their surroundings. They are often poorer, less educated, and do not have the skills or the means to live in an internationalist world – they are in fact, nationalists, that is, they belong to a particular place and are proud of it.

Since NAFTA was implemented in the 90s: 30% drop in manufacturing employment, from 17.7 million jobs at the end of 1993 to 12.3 million at the end of 2016. That's just NAFTA alone, can you even imagine the kind of damage this has done to other industries exporting our manufacturing to China and India? The somewheres were the most impacted by this. These are the people living in the heartland of America, producing steel, manufacturing industrial goods, mining, farming, etc. Jobs that have been devastated with barely anything to replace it.

Neither Clinton – who sold the US out to China, nor Bush or Obama did anything to fix this. After the 2008 housing crash by 2014 most Urban areas recovered, most rural and sub-rural areas did not. Is it no wonder then that in 2016 Hillary lost the Industrial mid-west that was staunchly Democrat for decades? Trump appealed to the somewheres. He was the raging bull in the china shop that is the modern American political system. Whether he succeeded or not is up for debate (I argue he spent more time trying to defend his Presidency than he did in actually doing what he set out to do.) but the anger is still there. And the "anywheres" who compose the vast bulk of our journalistic class will never truly understand. Which is why they are putting out articles bewildered by why Biden is so unpopular – they literally are this out of touch. Nor are the solutions the "anywheres" have truly align with the problem; so many of them view strictly from the view of "well they need more welfare" – rather than "well you took away any meaning and purpose in their life because it's cheaper to import steel than it is to make it domestically".

But…Here's the thing. From the perspective of the globe, globalization lifted billions out of poverty. Undernourishment and maternal deaths are both down more than 40 percent since 1990. Famines are becoming increasingly rare, there is ascending IQ, global GDP is rising, more people are enjoying comfortable lives than ever before. All at the cost of the Western worker, the western world's stability.

Sir Geoffrey E. Pattie, founder and chairman of Cambridge Analytica and parent SCL Group (Strategic Communications Laboratories); [is] co-founder with George Soros of the Open Society Foundation.

That explains a lot.

I am struggling with my political opinions as I no longer know if my really extreme misanthropy is or isn't getting in the way of me seeing things objectively.

Still hard not to be a misanthrope counting this decade and the current political landscape but yeah I am doubting myself

The original antiwork subreddit is back, bunch of mods had to step down but besides that everything is back to normal

Not that I think they will accomplish much, but yeah turns out they didn't leave for very long.

An antivax trucker convoy in Canada is theorized to be connected to white nationalist groups.

I am so mad at these racist spoiled brats expecting to be served by their country just because they settled there with a flag first. They're the brakes of the world. They are the ones robbing us of our freedoms.

I know right? Antivaxx, conspiracy theorist, politicaly extremistic and racist? Great… It's like they are actively trying to be awful .

At least they haven't gotten violent….yet

So, a couple things. First, being against vaccine mandates isn't the same as being against vaccines as a whole, and the convoy seems to be much more in the former camp than the latter. You may disagree with it, but I don't feel like that's remotely "anti-vaxx"; at the least, there's no significant factors in common.

Second, "theorized" is the right word to use here, as the connections seem tenuous at best. An organizer was involved in a global protest movement a few years ago that was occasionally, but generally not, anti-immigrant? Some nobody from a garbage-bin nonprofit claims they're directly adjacent to "conspiracy theorists" because… just trust me bro? Not remotely compelling.

And third, it's governments who are robbing us of our freedoms, not the people you disagree with. It's all the machinations of power-hungry politicians and corporate interests; convincing people that their fellow citizens are the "real" enemy for whatever reason is a tactic to keep people distracted from this fact. And honestly, it works way better than it really should.

They're opposing the trudeau government in a power grab, being smeared as racists is not suprising in the least.

It'd be pathetic if it didnt keep winning them elections.

I am torn because on one side reddit movements are cringe and anti-work probably does deserve the mockery because…wow that was stupid but on the other hand if our capitalistic world keeps going as it is we apparently will be eating BUGS, dealing with massive hurricanes and living in pods so something should probably change.

I have my doubts the future will be pleasant if important social movements are happening on fucking reddit and twitter, especially cause the mods turn out to be pedophiles afterwards (true story). I am honestly kind of glad I am literally incapable of reproduction, I don't think I would want my children to be born into the potential shit storm we will see in the future.

I want to be optimistic cause I know pessimism is annoying but….wow….wooow….not the best signs, especially with a potential ww3

Oh yeah, it's strange to see internet things get mentioned in the news. The interview was frankly embarrassing, I wonder how Fox News managed to find such a living stereotype.

I think it can actually be a good thing when movements turn on their leaders when they're revealed to be clowns. Good mockery can have a cleansing effect on corruption by removing egomaniacs and keeping people sane and grounded vis-à-vis the general populace.

People need to be able to make fun of their leaders, otherwise you have cults of personality like Jonestown.

In practice anti mandate and antivaxx are the same
either way it's stopping people from getting vaccinated
anti mandate is just considered socially acceptable because our society values people's feelings over anything else

It never was going to accomplish much. What started out as a subreddit for people posting funny posts from terrible employers and them quitting on such employers (incidentally, exactly as how capitalism was intended to be), turned into the playground of today's commie-larping NEETs and anarchists who strive for some magical Star-Trek Utopia where they can spend 10 hours out of a week writing bad poetry that wouldn't pass the bar in middle-school creative writing class, and call it a job. That the mod-team decided to put an autistic trans-gender 30 year old dog-walker who looked like they haven't showered in a week, and still lives in a basement, to go on Fox News of all the places to speak for the community is absolutely peak reddit.

Do you know why these movements fail?
Here's the thing: the overwhelming vast majority of people that comprise these movements live in a relative luxury. It's true. The vast majority of these people are NEETs. They are relatively secure in the rat race of society. It's one thing to live every day knowing that you're barely making ends-meet and if you lose your job you're family may be out on the street, it's another to be a comfortable suburbanite 30 year old dog-walker who wishes they have achieved their long lasting dream of being a philosophy teacher.
Look at Occupy Wallstreet – the movement was mostly composed of relatively young, suburbanite millenials, most college-educated. The movement didn't and couldn't form a coherent list of demands because this was a movement of inexperienced, yet privileged bleeding hearts who speak on behalf of classes and peoples they never interacted with, and if they did, would absolutely hate.
Say what you will about stonetoss – I find some of his stuff to be pretty offensive for my own tastes – but some of his comic strips are absolutely on point.
But this one in particular is an excellent summation of the modern progressive left:

And the thing is…it's not particularly new. The prog-left has been for near 50 years now utterly baffled by why the "working class" is so utterly hostile to them. Simply put. This isn't the 19th century. This isn't even the early 20th century. The bulk of modern progressivism isn't centered around the factory laborer, the farmer, the working heartland of the US. It hasn't been like this since I'd say the 70s. The modern prog-left is composed largely of either the college educated, the creatives, the tech wizards, the comfortable left behinds.

Normally a pandemic would be a good time for some creative destruction, it would be better for much of the economy to revalue some careers and how it does business. An ecomony that is so fragile to disruptions that it actually impedes efforts to counter issues is a disgrace, and will need to reform.

A focus on efficiency instead of resilience has made everything more fragile, future businesses will need to setup redundancies and a core group of workers who can weather crises. That means building real teams, instead of relying on itinerant workers. In a way, returning to a time where uncertainty meant you needed reliable company men. Businesses that can survive disasters, riots, logistical disruptions and who knows what else will have an advantage.

One the topic of class, the US seems to be banning books, limiting abortion rights, censorship and engaging in medical conspiracy theories. They're going in the direction of social crackdown that China and Russia engaged in. I would hope the American intellectuels and/or progressives would be very alarmed at that and I'm bewildered at the Republican Middle Class who are doing nothing about this or in some cases making the situation worse. They're playing a dangerous game.

There a good point about anti-mandate and anti-vaxx crossing, with many finding that they can't get their own consitutents to get vaccinated by themselves. It completely undermines the message of the former when the latter is present.

Then again, with only two parties, you end up with strange coalitions and crossed priorities.

Yeah I know the whole political landscape is a dysfunctional mess of elites fighting elites. Working conditions been taking a nosedive in quality but I doubt this is how anything will be done about it.

I dont have a plan or direction to take btw, the future just looks grim to me

John Hopkins is at it again in this January 2022 meta-analysis of the effect of lockdowns:

"Overall, our meta-analysis fails to confirm that lockdowns have had a large, significant effect on mortality rates. Studies examining the relationship between lockdown strictness (based on the OxCGRT stringency index) find that the average lockdown in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% compared to a COVID-19 policy based solely on
recommendations. Shelter-in-place orders (SIPOs) were also ineffective. They only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 2.9%.
Studies looking at specific NPIs (lockdown vs. no lockdown, facemasks, closing non-essential businesses, border closures, school closures, and limiting gatherings) also find no broad-based evidence of noticeable effects on COVID-19 mortality. However, closing non-essential businesses seems to have had some effect (reducing COVID-19 mortality by 10.6%), which is likely to be related to the closure of bars. Also, masks may reduce COVID-19 mortality, but there is only one study that examines universal mask mandates. The effect of border closures, school closures and limiting gatherings on COVID-19 mortality yields precision-weighted estimates of -0.1%, -4.4%, and 1.6%, respectively. Lockdowns (compared to no lockdowns) also do not reduce COVID-19 mortality."

As the years role on, we are going to look back with 20-20 hindsight (heheh) and we will turn heroes into villains and villains into saints.

Did the study also consider the time won for scientists to develop vaccines in 2020? This means that did 2020 lockdowns mean that by the time lockdowns ended, most people who wanted a vaccine, got it before they caught COVID?

I would argue that america and Britain are poor signifiers of the effectiveness of lockdowns. A lot of countries that were more aggressive with early lockdowns had managed to almost completely tamp down on the Covid-19 pandemic because they prevented the disease from disseminating throughout the populace early on, which meant that whenever theres a flair up its easy to figure out where its coming from and prevent its spread. In America and Britain, homes of antivaxx movements and lax early/inconsistent from state to state lockdowns due to fear of the economy being impacted, it spread far and wide, so now if a state does bother to heavily lock down all that is going to happen is that the spread slows a small amount, and then the second the lockdown is lifted people from nearby states or communities who didn't take the virus seriously will immediately begin respreading the disease

I don't particularly understand how lockdowns had an effect on time won for scientists to develop the vaccines. Whether the lockdowns happened or not the vaccine's development wouldn't have been effected I would think.

From looking at the study they didn't just look at America and Britain but compared it across many other countries. The study also addresses strictness. I'll quote it here:
"Since the studies examined use different units of estimates, we have created common estimates
for Europe and United States to make them comparable. The common estimates show the effect
of the average lockdown in Europe and United States (with average stringencies of 76 and 74,
respectively, between March 16th and April 15th, 2020, compared to a policy based solely on
recommendations (stringency 44))."…"The average lockdown in Europe between March 16th and April 15th, 2020, was
32 points stricter than a policy solely based on recommendations (76 vs. 44). In United States, it
was 30 points. Hence, the total effect of the lockdowns compared to the recommendation policy
was -6.37 deaths/million in Europe (32 x -0.200) and -5.91 deaths/million in United States. With
populations of 748 million and 333 million, respectively the total effect as estimated by Ashraf
(2020) is 4,766 averted COVID-19 deaths in Europe and 1,969 averted COVID-19 deaths in
United States. By the end of the study period in Ashraf (2020), which is May 20, 2020, 164,600
people in Europe and 97,081 people in the United States had died of COVID-19. Hence, the
4,766 averted COVID-19 deaths in Europe and the 1,969 averted COVID-19 deaths in the
United States corresponds to 2.8% and 2.0% of all COVID-19 deaths, respectively, with an
arithmetic average of 2.4%. Our common estimate is thus -2.4%, cf. Table 3. So, this means that
Ashraf (2020) estimates that without lockdowns, COVID-19 deaths in Europe would have been
169,366 and COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. would have been 99,050."

The meta analysis highlights that Europe was only a bit more stricter on average than the US, and without lockdowns only a few thousand people would have died more than otherwise.

Yeah …this is are pretty lousy times to live in, It could be way worse but everything just kind of sucks. Pays are super low, everything is super expensive, the economy is fucked, … Can't think of much that is better now than in say… 2012.

Maybe the continuous rise of PC culture from 2012 to 2022 was a good thing?…

Well a lot of good came of it I guess but…

I ain't fully sure about that tbh, especially now that corporations are trying to profit of PC stuff and twitter being toxic as all hell.

Yeah I got nothing, it's been pretty lousy

Well, lockdowns reduced the number of people infected very significantly. That meant that by the time the vaccines became available, most people were still not infected by COVID-19 and therefore could get the vaccine before the virus.

I think it's worth mentioning the differences between countries affected. Denmark may be able to afford going back to normal. The rest of Western Europe is a hotspot and the US's cumulative deaths during the Omicron Wave is far above any other developped country.

To quote: " Americans are now dying from Covid at nearly double the daily rate of Britons and four times the rate of Germans.The only large European countries to exceed America’s Covid death rates this winter have been Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Greece and the Czech Republic."

My theory is that the US's excessive death rates for the current wave are also because the healthcare system is completely inadequate, and because Omicron is more infectious, but less deadly, but it's still deadly if untreated, it's paradoxically killing more. Same for the others, more limited health coverage due to lack of funds.

I have a least one answer on why some countries did better: "A study published in the scientific journal The Lancet on Tuesday by Mr. Bollyky and Dr. Dieleman of the University of Washington found that a given country’s level of distrust had strong associations with its coronavirus infection rate. "What our study suggests is that when you have a novel contagious virus,” Mr. Bollyky said, “the best way for the government to protect its citizens is to convince its citizens to protect themselves.”"

In the end, it all comes down to trust in one's society.

Did they?

I'm somewhat skeptical about how the US determines it's deaths since it mixes Died FROM covid and Died WITH covid to be the same thing, on top of the fact that the criteria of what determines a COVID death has been decentralizer, i.e. states determine that themselves. Regardless, I agree here. The #1 thing that any government must do in a time of a health emergency is maintain credibility. But our institutions and our government has literally failed at this since day 1.

Yeah this COVID stuff will probably last until 2030. Maybe 2030 won't be complete shit who knows. I doubt it will last more than 10 years though but again nobody truly knows when this will end.

I mean call me a fearmonger but every time it seems like this will end it doesn't and some new stupid variant appears, the ligma variant will be especially lethal I presume.

"But the vaccine" yeah the vaccine is great but it has been far from a magic cure, new variants keep appearing and people will keep refusing to take the vaccine so it's almost a moot point, tbh this looks like a decade wide endeavor

The virus will last untill mankind itself dies out, the panic will last until politicians risk losing elections over it.

Fortunately in my neck of the woods that has already happened..

As always, democracy is a popularity contest, with actual issues being ignored because people stopped caring

In the end deaths are due to two causes: cardiac arrest (heart doesn't work) followed by brain death or hypoxia (lung doesn't work) followed by brain death. Maybe the stress of Covid causes cardiac arrest, so it's not technically death from Covid, but that's quibbling. Outright dying with Covid and not having it contribute to the cause of death requires pretty extraordinary circumstances.

One scenario could be that someone with rather mild symptoms gets shot, or dies from cancer first or dies from a car crash, but those are statistical outliers. Any country which has enough of those incidents that it becomes statistically significant has a problem.

I think it's worth looking at excess deaths. That shows a much clearer picture for the situation in countries such as the US, India and Russia. Russia and the US are around 1.2 to 1.3 million last time I checked, and India is between 4 to 9 million, there's even worse issues of reporting. Now it wouldn't surprise me if Omicron caused deaths because the beds are full, delaying medical care. There's been stories of diabetics being passed over by the covid stricken.

I know an early pandemic talking point was that China was hiding it's deaths, but seeing how Japan, Taiwan and South Korea have handled it? East Asia may just have handled it better, due to either culture, social trust or prior experience. Deaths were preventable, any failures are on all our heads. I think we can all agree that the collapse in trust is bad, and I have a bad feeling that countries which were hit hard by Covid will end up even more divided.

You ever hear the story of Chicken Little?