Three guesses who 'they' are...
Edited to add - To be clear for anyone, it's Oligarchs/Billionaires paired with rampant, unfettered corporate greed. (at least in my view)
Someone reminded me that I was using dogwhistle parlance in my use of they which may have suggested otherwise.
Here are some visual aids to accompany my clarification:
The end of that one Brother Ali song, I have no idea who the vocalist for that part is.
They keep sayin' we're free...
But we're all just loose.
You ain't free, you're just free range.
This is the crux of many a sci-fi stories where humanity is controlled by aliens.
Brother Ali don't miss
💯
I had no idea this was showing up a couple months ago, and what a treat it is!
Uncle Sam Goddamn
I know this isn't what you intended, but you gotta be careful on the Internet saying 'guess who 'they' are', cos a lotta places on the Internet ask this and the answer is supposed to be 'jews'
Yes, that's a great point that I hadn't considered.
To be clear for anyone, it's Oligarchs/Billionaires paired with rampant, unfettered corporate greed. (at least in my view)
I thought you just meant capitalists in general, TBH.
Yeah I can't think what else OP could mean though? All the other answers I can think of are too broad and obvious for "three guesses" to be a thing you'd ask.
3 guesses: Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg
One would need to be way out there deep into White Supremacist/Nazi territory to think "Jews" is the answer to that "riddle".
Whilst the Far-Right is in resurgence in the West, they're way more likely to be rabidly anti-Immigrant and Islamophobic than they are rabidly anti-Semitic, so I would be massively surprised that here in Lemmy there were more than a handful (if any at all) of people who read that and thought that was actually the answer (and no, thinking it might be misinterpreted as such isn't the same as actually thinking that's actually the answer)
Society works exactly as expected for the capitalists. At the end of the day we're only dollars to them.
Often both political parties answer to capitalist with Representatives that are also capitalists with absolutely no way to force them to answer to the people.
It's time to let this system go and switch to something new. Electoralism will not save us.
Your political affiliation based on what came to your mind when you read the title
At this point the answer should be billionaires regardless of affiliation.
I think the libertarian left quadrant is the only valid one, and it's become very obvious at this point
The global economy is this monster of debt and overly clever math that is actively collapsing, there's no fixing it, and even if we did somehow, each boom-bust is exponentially larger than the last one
And if you take the economy out of the equation, it's a really simple question. Do you want people to suffer or not? Are you pro-horrors beyond comprehension, or do you prefer less suffering?
So yep... We should all be calling them the billionaires at this point
A) What the fuck are billionaires? The bourgeoisie.
B) What facilitates this perversion? The bourgeois system.
Billionaires aren't the problem they're the symptoms of disease. Rejection of this fact shows the early stages of your radicalization.
Accurate AF
Might as well replace Jews with Muslims these days. Not that the far right types who blame Jews don't exist anymore... most of them just shifted focus.
The F’d up thing is that being solid middle class and having sufficient income to help with a kid’s college money, put away money to actually retire, and pay a mortgage is top 10%. That’s literally what middle class was 50 years ago. Now you have to be a ~10%-er to do it.
I make twice the average household income where I am by myself. I'm doing okay, but like, not great at the same time. How the fuck are other people surviving???
Edit: Just kidding, I got the stats wrong, I make a bit above average household on my own, not twice. Point still stands, however.
Barely.
Yeah, remember when "Wow, I could make $100,000 a year?" was impressive? It was not that long ago.
It's still better than what most people make, but it's really not a lot anymore.
We're able to just barely do those things on a just below median household income in a just above median cost of living area for one very, very specific reason: My wife's greatest generation grandparents saw the economic writing on the wall 20+ years ago and went into assisted living to give their only grandchild their house as a wedding present. If we had real housing costs while living here we'd be paycheck to paycheck without kids at best.
And that isn't an accident. It's by design.
It's a race to the bottom. Go look for a job now. Your best offers are less than half what they should be. They want masters degrees and a decade of experience for "entry level" work. The more desperately poor people there are the less they can offer to recruit. Less pay, fewer benefits.
you think 'they' means multiple people or a group, but 'they' is actually ME!! I DID IT!!
please stop doing capitalism mr burgerpocalypse
I beg of you, please stop. Please end this suffering.
Dammit, burgerpocalypse! How could you‽
A truly free market will always result in total monopoly. There is no such thing as a “free market” and capitalism is evil. Everything about society is a human construct built by humans and can be rebuilt by other humans. We can create a just society.
Don't forget the $1.4T/year they took out of the economy to squander on elaborate, invasive, predatory mass surveillance, serial racialized harassment, and overseas mass murder, in the name of peace and security.
Literally everyone.
Most people think this shit. They’re all complicit.
Bloody apathetic species. I’ve no sympathy at all.
They made healthcare a commodity, education a dept trap and housing a speculation market - then told you that poverty is a personal failing. They privatized survival and called it freedom.
They made healthcare a commodity, education a dept trap and housing a speculation market - then told you that poverty is a personal failing. They privatized survival and called it freedom.
I'm bad about remembering Alt Text apologies. I will edit to add now if it will let me.
And yet they're all for government intervention when it's stuff like zoning (telling you where and how you're allowed to live) or copyright (telling you what ideas you're allowed to share)...
"It's both sides"
If you’re talking about American politics, then yes, both parties uphold capitalism and its innate unjust power structures.
You can vote for the lesser evil all day, but in the end it will take revolution to root out evil entirely.
them Duke boys?
And now they're trying to automate community, the last thing we have. Don't let them!
Market economy is really really bad in a capitalistic system. One giant buys everything and controls everything.
In lieu of anything constructive or interesting to say, I’m going to pretend to be an LLM:
🔥 You’re not just complaining, You’re convicting.
The education being a debt trap is at least in part due to good intentions gone wrong.
College was a little expensive and they wanted it more accessible, so they tried to make it nice and easy to borrow money.
Universities responded to the influx of cash by... Charging more money...
We tried to fix affordability by just flooding that market with loans with no regulation in place to constrain the universities or the loans.
There's nothing well-intentioned about making debt (borrowing) easier to accumulate.
Studying should be free.
Reptilians? Bilderbergers? Solarians?
Clearly its the 99.9% of us who are too poor to know any better
Maybe if y'all weren't so scared to "throw your vote away".
Lol, get out of here with that shit
I'm just listening to Uncle Acid
Technically nobody made those things commodities, they just stand in the way of fixing it. Healthcare has always been a service since its inception, and nothing is free.
Probably Obama, Clinton, or Reagan. Weird how much overlap there is between them.
Surely it's the opposing team in the political theater that is to blame
Left: "We should have socialized healthcare, education, and housing."
Right: "We should have rent-seeking in healthcare, education, and housing."
You: "Both sides are the same."
Coming back and rereading this. I see that you used Left and Right rather than the R vs D show teams, that's my bad
Left: “We should have socialized healthcare, education, and housing.”
I mean, there's The Left[Hakeem Jefferies/Gavin Newsom] and The Left[Bernie Sanders/JD Pritsker/Jeremy Corbyn] and then The Left[the DSA kids distributing food and fresh clothing to my nearby homeless encampment]. These are three very different flavors of Left.
You: “Both sides are the same.”
A big part of the problem with liberal democratic politics is how deeply co-opted all these parties have become. At the end of the day, John Thune and Chuck Schumer, Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer, Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre all bend the knee to Jamie Diamon and Jeff Bezos and Muhammad bin Salmon.
Wish it weren't so, but that's the world we live in.
The cinnamon thing isn't even a hypothetical, that's literally based on real (recent) events in the US.