https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/30/capitalism-isnt-working-us-politicians-child-labor

I agree he's too old, and I wish by now he would have mentored someone to stand behind to replace him.

It's not like we aren't already irreparably fucked, but losing having any rational voice in the Senate will feel like another blow to our corporate owned zombie of a nation.

That said, not like our single digit collection of leftist Congress people are able to do anything but spin wheels. The Neoliberals have more respect for their old guard Republican opposition than for people like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez.

Humans:

I don't mean it that literally. I mean just observing swaths of people putting straws into drinks, putting ointments on scrapes, etc might make them extrapolate and try similar actions using what's available to them.

It's not much of a reach for a primate seeing a human manipulate and dig with a shovel, and use that as inspiration to manipulate a bamboo shoot to scratch their own back.

We homosapiens spent 180,000 ish years wandering around in the dirt like idiots before it occurred to some of us that we could grow food in one place, thus beginning the path to civilization. Even we need examples to extrapolate from.

The difference might be in primates in captivity learning from humans using tools around them all day every day. Primate see primate do trial and error.

One seen doing it spontaneously in nature might be more significant.

"Cancel D-Day or ve vill gas all ze Jews!"

Kind of an empty threat considering that's what you were actively doing anyway...

I imagine they would make excellent fertilizer.

Plays Circle of Life from Lion King

Because we the sucker peasants of the west have largely been propagandized by the owner class from birth into embodying this meme:

Why do vaccines need to be made by private companies for private profit at all? Why not publically funded research at universities and agencies that charge reasonably for use, where that capital is either turned into more public research or other commons? Other than the fact that we starved public research almost to death to cut private industry for private profit's taxes.

Also private industry does NOT belong in basic utilities everyone needs AT ALL.

There should not be a single power plant or utility that's for private investor profit. It's too important to have any allegiance other than serving the citizenry full stop. There should be no private investor in a position to advocate sticking it to captive customers (or our sole shared communal habitat), who need any common utility like elec-fucking-tricity, to increase their quarterly private profit expectations. But here we are.

NEOliberals absolutely would. I'm not accusing the minority within the majority members like Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez of such things.

https://apnews.com/article/business-nancy-pelosi-congress-8685e82eb6d6e5b42413417f3d5d6775

Both parties literally put blinders on for places like Saudi Arabia because they're good customers for our military industrial complex.

If we can fight the owners to keep our shitty back breaking jobs and win, we should have fought the owners to rebuild our economy for automation profits to largely benefit the people from the bottom up.

If we the peasant masses even can win against the tiny owner class oligarchs, lets fight for the right thing. And if we can't win, well then it's all masturbation anyway and they'll do what they want.

It's irrational to fight for "we demand to continue to break our backs making your shit instead of robots so we can continue to subsist on menial laborer wages with broken backs!" in any event. That's some coal miner excuse for logic.

Externality: Noun - Capitalist term for "I already got your fucking money, so my mess is your problem you fucking sucker peasants 🖕🤑💰"

Automation isn't the enemy.

As ever, the owner class that hoards and wages economic war on you though automation for their exclusive benefit at their society's expense are your enemy, whether you would fight them or not.

Arguing that we should "save" back breaking, repetitive unnatural movement, manual labor jobs that break human bodies by the time they're 40 is the WRONG hill to die on. Fight for the citizenry to reap the benefits of automation through taxation, not to keep shitty jobs robots can do faster and better. Fight to change the economy so that everyone doesn't need meaningless jobs machines can do better so we can have actual time to live our lives.

Taxing the fuck out of automation would let everyone win, because a heavily taxed robot is still far cheaper for the company than a human or possibly several humans for that one robot would be, so automation is here either way. We can riot to change our economy to benefit from this technology as we should, or we can be steamrolled yet again by the dictates of the affluent who will demand and get all the benefits and none of the responsibility if not confronted and countered on revolutionary terms.

Please pick the former. There's no dignity or meaning to be had shuffling boxes around in an Amazon warehouse. Begging the owners to let us try to continue to compete with literal purpose built repetitive labor machines is not the way.

"What an absolute disgrace! We must not allow this travesty to continue!

The Union of Concerned Scientists must be punished, in order to protect our beloved economy and the quarterly earnings of private shareholder portfolio staples like Tyson foods/TSN!"

-Neoliberals to fascists, probably

But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders!

No, just because we're living in the decline of the empire/regime dejour, doesn't mean we don't still live our lives when possible.

As an example, If my country, the US, saned up tomorrow and started collecting guns, like actually enforcing it including the inevitable stand offs with the nutters climbing bell towers over it to get it fucking done, I would throw mine in the pile eagerly. Wont happen, but I don't fetishize the firearm I own explicitly and exclusively to defend myself from the gun nuts.

I have to live next to the neoconfederate nutters with arsenals. I am still subject to the violence of their nuttery. When in (the fall of) Rome.

It's just become steeped in tradition, and sorry to be a stereotypical edgelord and quote Rick Sanchez but scientifically, traditions are an idiot thing.

Thats why I choose to be a pessimist. It eliminates disappointment.

Expect the worst from humans and you'll usually end up being factually correct, you'll never be disappointed, and occasionally, if the moon and the stars align, you just might be pleasantly surprised about something at some point in your life, just don't count on it.

Optimism looks fucking exhausting when dealing with our gem of a species. Being let down most of the time and still putting on a smile for the next disappointment you won't expect 5 minutes later. Looks like masochism minus the sexual pleasure. Good luck with that optimists!