Its worse than that. A corporation starts a charity or gives 100k to one. Real nice right? Nope.

They will:

1. use that to decrease their tax burden, robbing the commons of their share of taxes to repair the infrastructure their semi-trucks and businesses disproportionately use and tear up, the public educated, pre-literate workforce they have access to, and then…

2. they ADVERTISE how noble they are, spending millions upon millions in ad buys to tell you what how awesome they are for donating that 100k. They use the guise of what is supposed to be giving with no expectation of return, ie “charity,” as a marketing strategy, and then…

3. They use such initiatives as lobbying tools to explain why their industry doesn’t need to be taxed to institutionally, societally address the issue that is currently subject to the transient whims of charity.

There is nothing a publically traded corporation does that isn’t done out of greed, that isn’t calculated to provide more return than dispursment. Nothing.

Charity with any expectation of return, beyond a warm fuzzy feeling inside, isn’t charity at all, but there is a word for it: a transaction.

For all the camps we’ve freed that get unfreed, abortion, civil rights, on and on, We NEVER seem to get around on marching on Berlin. In fact, Berlin has has been reinforcing its walls and turrets unopposed for over 50 years. They do make so many jobs after all. We hate the camps, but ignore the ones that commission them.

How would one sustainably protect/save the Jews (and all the other victimized groups) without first dismantling the Nazi regime?

Sure you can free this camp and that camp without marching on Berlin, but if the machine, the source that propagates it and maintains it remains intact, you’re addressing a symptom of the primary cause and they’ll just build more camps.

If you resolve one social wedge, they’ll stoke another in it’s place through the government they fully captured decades ago. Why do you think they’re actively unresolving decades settled resolutions through their Federalist Society judges?

Not all, but nearly all.

Abortion should be legal and available to all women, that said, around 40% of them are done for economic reasons: https://bmcwomenshealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1472-6874-13-29

Hence the issue is greatly exacerbated by our capitalist dystopia.

I don’t think I need to l source the economic growth incentive for exploiting undocumented immigrant labor they invite, while at the same time propagandizing half the country to hate them so they don’t gain social footing to get fair pay.

Climate change, hmmm…

Collapse of the nuclear family and birth rate, hmmm…

K-12 educational collapse due to tax breaks for a certain economic class in almost every state, hmmm…

Higher ed being bastardized from a societal necessity to a for profit indentured servant factory, hmmm…

Food deserts and urban decay from big box stores killing main street to eliminate threats and then pulling out of those neighborhoods once succeeding leaving nothing but abandoned disaster areas, hmmm…

I’m sure there are some national problems that aren’t caused by, substantially exacerbated by, or intentionally stoked for division by our owner class through their captured governments and bully pulpit, but without addressing our rigged economy and the wealth class gaining more hard power year after year, I’m sorry but it’s deck chairs by comparison.

Once again, social wedges. Indentured servitude never went away, it just rebranded. The almost entirely caucasion owner class did cling to using race as the ultimate tool for coerced labor, but after generations of resistance, and the unquenchable quest for unsustainable growth, more than half a century ago decided that having a racial underclass in a largely white population simply wasn’t enough exploited labor to increase their wealth and power fast enough, as it’s never fast enough.

The poor, true believer Fox News consuming racists are the cultural remnant of that long abandoned unspoken compact between the wealth class and their once favorite colored, highest ranking capital batteries when it was convenient. Racism is real. Racism is wrong, but to the oligarchs, it’s become just another tool to manipulate their labor pool.

Some might see it as poetic justice on the once complacent white peasants who took solace in being the richer, more socially powerful peasants, and that’s fine, but unproductive, as we have a common enemy who manipulates and stokes such anymous with the means of major media propaganda they own to maintain productivity. It’s easier than chains, it’s more insidious than Jim Crow. Just turn half fhe peasants against the other half and they’ll never look up. You can’t argue with the effectiveness.

Not to mention K-12 that isnt in literal ruin, so underfunded that becoming a teacher, what should be one of society’s most revered professions, is a life on the edge of poverty. How about our tent cities in every major city filled with our beaten, hopeless brothers and sisters our society throws away like garbage for the crime of not being effective enough capital batteries.

I could get into other stuff but there’s just too fucking much. Almost all of which stems from allowing insatiable greed to fester and metastasize until it became an aspirational trait and core value in the US. Now half the peasants dream in vain of being in the Oligarch class doesn’t instead of condemning and dismantling such a class.

The Gorden Geckos/Mr Potters/Ebenezer Scrooges were elevated and deified and allowed to run a muck here and warp our nation and increasingly the world to their cancerous, antisocial vision, and everyone outside of the owner class lost, even most who are their most zealous defenders.

These social issues vasculate by design to keep the peasants of every color at each other’s throats.

The only real war is class war, too bad our owners propagandized us from birth to refuse to fight that particular war.

Now by all means, carry on fighting over the social wedges that are largely caused or exacerbated by our rigged capitalist dystopia.

Just don’t be late for work, my fellow capital batteries.

It’s a numbers thing and it’s why empathy tends to diminish as population swells.

Here it feels like community, like one’s opinion is appreciated. Reddit became a place to hope you get acknowledged at all, where swaths of the community came solely waiting to shout others down and win a fight.

Unfortunately, for all of Reddit’s faults, that wasn’t a reddit thing, that was just a glaring, crippling defect inherent to humanity. As numbers increase here, that old familiar reddit apathy and antagonism will return. Just play the game of what would you be willing to do, not just rhetoric, for a random person in your circle of friends vs someone from your town/city vs the world. Psychologists call it psychic numbing.

You don’t become a billionaire without being cool with exploiting people. Modern society rewards antisocial behavior.

I wasn’t planning on doing any banking through Lemmy.

Biden is a neoliberal capitalist. He helped write the law that glutted our for profit prison industry with new customers in the 90s.

We have two hyper-capitalist parties. We’re permitted by the owners to vote on the quaint social issues that don’t cost Wall Street significant profit, not on our rigged economy. Social issues engineered to ping pong to keep us divided and angry with each other so we don’t look up. Do you want your hyper-rigged crony capitalism with or without abortion access? That is the extent of our “freedom.”

There is no hope for that changing using our now corrupted and dismantled Constitutional tools, Reagan saw to that and Citizens United legalizing political bribery was the final nail. To paraphrase George Carlin, as we’re too chicken shit and social opiate addicted to rise up as we should, be happy with what you got, because there is no rational hope. Unless you’re in the little club, you’re irrevocably fucked and the plight of non-wealthy Americans will continue to decline until eventual collapse likely long after our peasant children are dead.

The last of us Part 1 PC.

If I’m feeling shooty, borderlands 3 or halo infinite on PC (my nostalgia for the franchises are too strong). I used to like GTA5 way back when, until it became purely a pay to win grind.

If I’m feeling like a story, I keep going back to skyrim after all these years. Also Last of Us, Spider-man, and the Jedi Outcast series.

If I’m feeling like some brain dead fun, I HIGHLY recommend a lesser appreciated gem: Orcs Must Die 3

If im feeling like spicy gaming, I have a highly modified version of skyrim for that too :)

Just as how Netlix tweeted “love is sharing a password” a couple years ago before fucking their subscribers with no lube, any confidence in reddit is gone. They professed different values than they demonstrate now.

They’re making insignificant carve outs FOR NOW to mitigate bad press and negative attention. Those will also go away in the name profit if Reddit survives this betrayal, maybe in a few months, maybe in a couple years, but the ground under which a sense of community formed is shattered irrevocably.

Why make content to profit a platform that openly disrespects and lies to its users, many many of whom provided free labor on the basis of that now erased sense of trust and respect?

And it will only get worse after the IPO, when activist investors insist on monetizing their shitty first party platforms even more.

Obviously not enohgh content or communities here, but the bones here seem good and that is what’s important starting out.