Me on Fourth of July like

Anyway, stop spreading white nationalist rhetoric and toxic nationalism thanks

Nobody said anything about race. Stop that.

It’s nationalist to state facts now?

How is this toxic?

Show me countries better than the USA.

economically

x

human freedom

x

quality of life

x

social progress 

x

income equality (america was among the worst)

x

healthcare

x x

gender equality

x

what exactly makes america the “best country” here? america doesn’t excel in anything.

I was gonna say aren’t we like #1 in a bunch of bad stats? Like aren’t we the top for rape and abuse?

we are superior in waging wars, exporting and using firearms, and incarcerating the population among a lot of other terrible things. how depressing is patriotism and nationalism?

I remember this epic moment from The Newsroom

Americans just buy into the propaganda they are the greatest country when there is absolutely zero evidence to say so.

Why are you on the fence. Relative to what though? A bunch of socialist trope studies emerging from an ideologically driven socialist enclave in academia? The fact of the matter is that if you manage to make about 30 grand a year you’re in the top 1% of income earners globally.

I’d say it’s the best in its class, a multi state trans continental union.

The worst part about America is the wealth it produced created several generations of smarmy and entitled cunts that have no understanding for the conditions that created the wealth in the first place and they’re bound and determined that our betters claim all power over us.

Imagine the level of capitalist brainwashing needed to respond to this recitation of shame by saying:

“But middle-income Americans earn more money than most people who live in poverty!”

and thinking that Makes America Great.

Because our wage slaves who spend their $30k per-year income live in such luxury, right?

every state marked in red is where minimum wage earners can afford a two bedroom rental

(none states are marked in red)

"If stuff was just handed to me I'd have no motivation to do anything! That's human nature!" No, babe, that's depression. Psychologically healthy people are still motivated to do things even when their survival isn't being actively threatened.

[Image description: tweet by Roxi Horror @roxiqt on March 30, 2022 at 11:13 AM: “’Oh, so you think everyone should just be handed enough money to live?’ lol. lmao. yeah.”]

okay so like, we all know that housekeeping in a hotel is a Shit Job, right?

I worked with a woman who was independently wealthy. But she liked working housekeeping. So she did. And if the manager got bitchy with her, she’d just shrug and be like “Okay, I can quit.”

Like the manager treated her like a human being because she knew she had to because otherwise she’d lose one of her best workers.

Yes, everyone should be just handed the money to live.

I worked with a lady who’s husband made more than enough to support them both.  She just did the retail to have something to do with herself part-time.

There’s a lot of people who’d happily do the same sort of thing.  Honestly?  A lot of the jobs we consider “shitty” jobs?  Are shitty because the employees are treated like garbage.

If employees weren’t being screwed over by people higher up the chain constantly or being forced to kiss the asses of customers currently shitting all over them, those jobs would by and large be a whole lot more bearable, and appealing to more people!!

Plus rich people are just handed a lot of money, whether they earn it or not, and no one questions that. Only poor people getting money gets interrogated over and over and over again.

I’d like to add a footnote to this thread that the US gives more money (by way of the income tax reduction) to homeowners than it does to poor people who need subsidized housing.

My best teacher in high school was the guy who had previously made a ton of money that he could’ve retired at like 30. Man just wanted to teach teenagers.

If people as a whole were handed enough money to live on, maybe more people like him wouldn’t be put off by the poor salary teachers make. (also teachers should be paid a lot more)

There's also this assumption that if people were just handed enough money to live that they'd do absolutely nothing, as if they'd be satisfied being completely bored all the time. They'd still buy food. They'd still buy video games. They'd still go out and get coffee and put money into the economy even if they didn't want to work because they still want to LIVE. They'd buy movies. They'd go DO stuff. I review comic books on the internet and I love doing it, but I often have to compromise on some things because I just can't afford to do otherwise and I stress out about stuff because I need to earn money.

"Psychologically healthy people are still motivated to do things even when their survival isn't being actively threatened."

Speaking for myself, I would be even MORE motivated to do things if my basic needs were guaranteed met. IJS

👆🏾👆🏾👆🏾👆🏾👆🏾

What I think some people miss about stuff like UBI (universal basic income, the idea that everyone gets a staple amount of money that could cover basic housing and food needs) is that... It doesn't really need to be a lot of money. The idea isn't "give everyone so much money they're now rich and can do whatever they want forever." The idea is to provide enough for their most basic needs (food water shelter). It's enough that if your job mistreats you, you are safe enough to leave it without the threat of becoming unhoused or starving. This, in turn, forces employers to treat their workers better because if they don't, then they don't get workers.

But the other side of this coin is that ONLY a person's basic needs are covered. As someone above said, people still want to do fun stuff! Fancy coffee and vacations and doing leisure activities like movies or bowling or whatever. Keeping pets. Having get togethers. If someone wants the extras in life, THAT'S the stuff they "should" be working for. That's the "well if they don't want to work then they don't get [whatever]!" that is the consequence of not working. Are some people gonna be fine not doing any extra stuff and just living basically? Sure! And that's okay. But most people DO want extra stuff and will work for it if they can (and if they can't they should still get extra basic income! Humans deserve enrichment!)

But "You don't get the vacation" is not the same consequence as "you don't get to live in a home or eat food today." The consequence of not working should NEVER be no longer having your basic needs met. And it's absolutely ridiculous that so many people have normalized that you work or you perish. We live in a society! We invented civilization to make it easier to care for one another and ensure everyone's basic needs get met! Human civilization began when we decided it's not "survival of the fittest" on our watch, but "survival of everyone we care about." We have lost our way if we cannot protect each other.

There's another issue at hand here, which is that we've structured society so that something random can happen to you & suddenly you owe more money than you've ever made in your life.

That's not inevitable. It's because you can make more money out of somebody if you've got them by the short hairs. In an emergency, you can't shop around.

But the effect is that everybody is incentivized to accumulate as much as they can, because the more money you have the more rare it is to encounter an accident that wipes you out in such a way that you can't recover.

UBI is great, and it'll get rid of a lot of misery and free up a lot of people to do jobs they want, but it won't go far enough on its own; the people who have been fucked by circumstance the most also are going to be the most dependent upon these 'optional' jobs, because (for example) what would be 'extra income' for a healthy person would be necessary for the chronically ill. It also wouldn't prevent other kinds of accidents from putting somebody into a poverty trap (ex., car crashes, house fires).

If we want a world worth living in, UBI is a good start, but other, more dramatic changes are also going to be necessary, because we're a long long way from a tolerable world.

this is socialism (positive) (i am all in)

wage labor is the worst vampire. anyone draining me dry should be in an ecstasy of indulgence. a frenzied bloodlust. consuming someone's life essence should at least feel good or make you drunk or horny or something. but what do we get? line go up. that's all, that's it. pathetic.

People that reply “Get a better job” is just another sign of how badly propagandized we are in this country.

I thot Oliver Cromwell died

- Forbidding the Irish people to speak their own language

- Persecuting Catholics, to the point where Catholic children couldn’t inherit, Catholics could not own land or engage in commerce, clergy were forbidden from wearing vestments and Catholics were not allowed to educate their own children

- Forcing the Irish to hand over their crops, except for potato’s.

- Not to mention the war crimes committed by the British in Northern Ireland during the troubles

But no, Ireland wasn’t colonized at all

This is what happens when you make a neat little victim box in your mental scaffolding and reject anyone who doesn't look like they belong in the box out of hand--you end up denying people who suffered centuries long oppression and genocide in a fit of smug, self-righteous, historically inaccurate pique and outing yourself as ignorant to the whole Internet.

I think these people would shit themselves if they learned how many ethnicities Russia/USSR has colonized

Or how many China has colonized

In a strange turn of events, it wasn’t skin color that made some people oppress others; it was access to power and a willingness to use it callously for their own good, with no regard for the suffering of anyone except their own.

It is always, ALWAYS about power and who can access it.

Let’s stop applying American race relations (read: white vs poc) to every historical conflict. The take “the Irish weren’t colonized or oppressed” only makes sense if you look at the history with an American lens where “white” = superior. Which is only a (literally) skin deep analysis of absolutely no substance.

Also let's stop thinking that American race relations boil down as simply to "white vs poc" because the concept of what counts as white is nowhere near as clear-cut through history as people think.

The British, along with competing European empires, were the ones who promulgated the pseudoscience of “race” - because they used it to delineate who would receive the spoils of empire (white) and who would supply the spoils of empire (colored). Irish people can be white or they can be wild island men depending upon the needs of the empire. This is why Dr. King said that racism cannot be separated from capitalism.

The violence done in the name of the white race exists alongside the violence of other tyrants and kings. We need to get over our guilt and look our history in the face. Maybe then we can make a world where $12 T-shirts sewn by southeast Asian wage slaves aren’t painfully normal.

not enough people know this

[ID: A poem written in Sharpie on a green surface. It reads:

Boss made a dollar I made a dime, That was a poem From a simpler time.

Now Boss makes a thousand And gives us a cent While he’s got employees Who can’t pay the rent.

So when boss makes a million And the workers make jack Then that’s when we riot And take our lives back

#WorkingClassSolidarity”

/End ID.]

working full time is terrible why do we just accept that having 8 days off a month is normal and okay........ being alive could be cool but we waste it at our JOBS.... sorry i’m just heated about capitalism again i’ll be fine

8 days....never thought about it like that 😓

This seems really whiny to me. Like, I agree with you, work sucks, but our ancestors didn’t get to browse tumblr at their desks or have the option to gleefully spend their ENTIRE WEEKENDS horizontal on the couch stuffing their faces/watching tv/playing video games/wacking off.  They didn’t have weekends. They just slaved away as fucking peasants from dawn to dusk until they died in childbirth or got the consumption.

I am perfectly happy working 8 hrs a day because I don’t have to:

grow my own food

find my own clean water

heat my house

shit in the woods

Hi, I study social and cultural anthropology. Humans working 40+ hours a week is 100% an industrial revolution thing and was not normal in the early stages of our existence. In fact, hunter and gatherer societies that still exist to this day spend about 15-20 hours a week TOPS working. The rest is dedicated to sitting around and telling stories and jokes, dancing, singing, eating, sleeping, fucking and so forth. Read a damn book.

When the medieval peasant - the iconic, screwed over, worst off person of pop culture - had more days and time off than you, something’s gone wrong. And apparently something has been wrong for a while now...

hold brands accountable for not paying their workers who are literally the backbone of their successful fast fashion companies. see who make the clothes you wear in your daily lives.

{art credit}

CARRD ON WHAT'S HAPPENING TO BANGLADESHI GARMENT WORKERS (made by @banglatown)

WHY YOU SHOULD DEMAND BRANDS TO PAY UP:

BRANDS WHICH NEED TO #PAYUP:

if any of your clothes have "made in bangladesh" tag, you are directly involved in participating in this unjust global supply chain. this is not a fucking trend, keep speaking out about this, and DEMAND that these brands pay their workers. #PAYUP.

Class warfare is nothing new. #MLKDay2020

adults, while forcing all children above the age of 5 to sit still, be silent, and obey orders for 7-8 hours a day with minimal breaks, reducing their exposure to fresh air and sunlight to almost nothing, forcing them to alter their natural sleeping patterns to increase productivity, and repeatedly telling them their self worth depends on their being able to follow these instructions perfectly for 13 or more years: kids these days are so lazy! they never go outside! they never want to do anything! clearly it’s not because of us!

The way we treat children is extremely inhumane, but so many adults want to dismiss it because it’s so normalized

You… You do realize that’s what it’s like to be a working adult…? And our days are even longer.

thats because an 8 hour work day is extortion and should be illegal. next question.

Either you’ve never had a job or you’re just lazy af. There’s nothing wrong with 9 to 5 jobs. Nobody is forcing people to work them and people need the hours to make more money. People get breaks too.

Please take a biology class & get some help. People shouldnt have to do work 80% of the day to survive.

@captainjack1999

1. the eight-hour work-day is cruelty

2. capitalism is forcing people to work. i could just quit my job and hang out at home - but then i would lose my house and most likely starve to death, because of the way our economy works.

3. breaks for most establishments are a mere 30 minutes for an 8-hour shift; at my first job, for a 6-hour shift, your break would only be 15 minutes and any longer shift would only get 30. studies say people are more productive if for every hour you work, you get a 15-minute break - meaning, for an 8-hour shift, you’d need an hour-long break, and so on and so forth.

the way modern society views work is unhealthy for loads of reasons, not just what i mentioned here. the fact that we’re preparing children for such a torturous lifestyle is horrific.

Also like…. small children are not adults. Small children should not be held to the same standards as adults. Even if the 8 hour work day WAS healthy, it would be inhumane to hold a small child to the same standard.

The school system was literally designed to train people for factory work back when child labour was legal so that should tell you how fucked that is

It would actually be a two hour break for 8 hours, and one hour for 4.

HR: if they work 40 hours a week u have to give them benefits

Big company: hmm okay. They shall work 39

HR: if they work 8 hours u have to give them a half hour lunch and intermittent breaks 

company: 7 hours and 50 minutes, it is 

the law: if theyre employees you have to pay for benefits

company: lets staff through a temp service and wait so long to hire them in they quit out of frustration

the law: You must pay them this and no less.

company: I shall pay them that and no more.

The law: you have to pay your employees

Company: then we’ll replace them all with interns

HR: if you grant someone tenure, they get all these rights and privileges, and that’s expensive.

School administration: got it, so you’re saying only hire lecturers and adjuncts.