“Most of the world” is definitely not petite bourgeois (which is what “middle class” is supposed to mean), neither in the west nor elsewhere. There are only ~36E6 small businesses in the US, many of which share owners and some of which are just shell companies. Even if we assume that every small business was owned by a single person, it’s still only around 10% of the population, in the “most entrepreneurial” country in the west.
No. Owning a business (as in, means of production) makes you a different class — bourgeois — not a class traitor. Belonging to a different class naturally changes what benefits you.
And yeah you shouldn’t automatically hate some petite bourgeois guy, they may be closer to lumpenproletariat than they are to haute bourgeois. But, as long as they own the business, they have a fundamentally different set of goals under capitalism compared to you, a worker.
Business owners are (generally) not your allies in the class war, no matter how small or large their business is.
In an ideal society? No.
However, in our current patriarchal nightmare, people other than cis-men need various special protections to soften the impacts of sexual violence, sexism, discrimination, and inequality, hence the need to have legally defined genders.
I wish those 5 were actually as left-wing as depicted here…
My one hope is we will have enough mortally devasting weather before it’s too late so that doubters will convince themselves.
I’m sorry to say that but it’s kinda “too late” already, to some definition. Even if we stop burning fossil fuels right now, human societies will not escape unharmed, there will be more crop failure leading to more famine leading to more war, even ignoring the “minutia” such as heat-related deaths and so on. Of course that’s not to say we shouldn’t fix our shit right now, because we still can reduce the impact and try to save our global “civilization” (or whatever you want to call the sum of human knowledge, connections, industry, material culture etc).
On a more hopeful level, I also think that pretty much whatever happens, homo sapiens as a species will probably survive. As primates, we are excellent at organizing in small groups and adapting our environments to suit us, however hostile they may be. Earth is huge, its flora and fauna is diverse, and even at +6-8℃ there will be some areas with ecosystems sturdy enough to sustain small populations of hunters-gatherers and even basic agricultural societies. And then, in a few thousands or tens of thousands of years, as the nature recoils from the shock and more and more land becomes habitable for humans again, they will rebuild. Since there won’t be any easily accessible oil or gas in the ground anymore, the new industrial revolution will naturally have to be more sustainable than ours.
Yes the speed is remarkable but it has still been much warmer or colder over a longer period.
This is precisely the point that comic is making tho. Yes, our planet has been a lot warmer than it is now, but as far as we know the changes we’re currently making to the climate are by far the most rapid in human history and this is bound to cause some civilization-scale issues. Even ignoring all the usual problems that will happen again due to a warmer climate (sea level rise, desertification etc), there are some novel ones. There will be no time for ecosystems and societies to adapt to different agricultural conditions, leading to widespread ecosystem and crop failures, cascading down to every aspect of human life.
Sorry, for the next decade there’s a scheduled finding out after the prolonged fucking around with greenhouse gas emissions.
I actually agree with you in principle: both should be legal and regulated. The extent of legality and regulation needs to be decided according to the use value/danger/harm of the item in question. Guns are generally much more dangerous than “party” drugs and so need to have stricter regulations.
If we’re barbaric, it’s because we murder criminals, not because it’s on Youtube.
100% agreed
You all imagine the people who will whoop and cheer; I imagine the people who will recoil in horror
I strongly doubt that though. I feel like a lot of people will cheer. And in any case this will desensitize people to violence; given how reactionary the US populace is, it’s probably not a good thing overall
What is the progress tho? US has been genociding an entire people for the past 3 years. It is as fucked in the head as it ever was.
Actually the top 1% in the US is ~600k per year. It’s a lot of cash but not entirely outside the realm of possibility for some extremely senior software architect/manager combo at some VC startup, which is also within the lemmy target audience.
No, all I’m saying is that small business owners are on the same side of the class divide as billionaires, so it’s not surprising they resort to the cheapest sloppies solutions and are trying to replace creative people with soulless automation.