Thank you, I’m aware. I just found the post overstated, and too akin to Great Man Theory, which IMO overlooks the larger context of the shitty system we’re currently stuck in. Commies and “commie memes” are usually against capitalism more than particular bad actors within it, however bad they may be. 
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I hear you.
I wasn’t trying to school you.
I am sorry.
I was trying to illustrate the depth and breadth of Reagan’s fuckery (or, as a fan of The Juice Media would put it, his shitfuckery). I was using your words as a starting point to shine a light on… that… man…
I admit my hostility to Reagan’s “ideas” and actions are based on his (and his enablers) very real impact on my friends and I, and our [economic et al.] lives: those who came of age in the 1980s as well as all who came after us.
The way he screwed the working class really did accelerate–and normalize–the destruction of the lives of working people and the precariat at the sharp end of… late stage capitalism? our Puritan-based culture’s war on poor people?
… which bring me to this:
… During his two terms in the White House (1981–89), Reagan presided over a widening gap between the rich and everyone else, declining wages and living standards for working families, an assault on labor unions as a vehicle to lift Americans into the middle class, a dramatic increase in poverty and homelessness, and the consolidation and deregulation of the financial industry that led to the current mortgage meltdown, foreclosure epidemic and lingering recession. …
Reagan’s fans give him credit for restoring the nation’s prosperity. But whatever economic growth occurred during the Reagan years mostly benefitted those already well off. The income gap between the rich and everyone else in America widened. Wages for the average worker declined and the nation’s homeownership rate fell. During Reagan’s two terms in the White House, the minimum wage was frozen at $3.35 an hour, while prices rose, thus eroding the standard of living of millions of low-wage workers. The number of people living beneath the federal poverty line rose from 26.1 million in 1979 to 32.7 million in 1988. Meanwhile, the rich got much richer. By the end of the decade, the richest 1 percent of Americans had 39 percent of the nation’s wealth. …
So yeah, I can see what @Purplecat 's posted image was on about. I get it.
Reagan, the accelerant.
Was the man responsible for all the injustices against workers in the U.S.?
No, of course not.
We’d have to spin that clock back to at least 1526 or maybe 1493.
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Yes, I do too. He really did manage to cause a lot of ongoing damage.
And he certainly was an accelerant! So to get back on topic, maybe what he accelerated was our death-rush toward the actual/inevitable end of capitalism?
Eep!
Not that there’d be many pieces left to pick up and try to use for building communism.
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Image transcript
natalieironside (Sep 22): Don’t forget to do an anarchy today
snug-the-joiner (Sep 23): Don’t tell me what to do
natalieironside (Sep 23): thats the spirit
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Frankly, given the enshittification of everything from websites to airplanes, I’d like businesses to be run a bit less like businesses. I’m not sure the precise name for the MBA ideology but it only exists to ruin things.
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It’s not very pithy, but “thoughtless, short-sighted greed” is accurate.
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How bout “needless heedless greed”?
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There’s more to it than that though. Like we have found there is the conviction that all businesses are the same, and everyone with experience saying otherwise is just an obstacle. It’s a very specific combination of greed, wilful ignorance, and smug arrogance.
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Adam Conover is getting younger?!
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Poster spotted in Brunswick, Victoria
I highly and soberly recco a visit to radicalgraff’s blog. They post seriously good shit.
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I haven’t been there in over a decade, but Brunswick was often referred to as The People’s Republic of Brunswick when I poked around there.
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The fantasy offered by so many roleplaying games is that of being a hero, a savior, the last hope of a besieged civilization. Disco Elysium turns that entire paradigm on its head. Civilization is already fucked, and not because of monsters but because of the impersonal machinations of capitalism and empire. You aren’t a hero; you’re a cop, a detective. You might be able to introduce a measure of justice into the world, but that might come at the cost of perpetuating the violence that’s built into the social system. The strength of Disco Elysium is that it manages to raise these questions in a manner that’s blunt but not didactic — or when it is didactic, it’s with a wink and a sly grin. It’s a game that makes the difficult matters of politics, ethics, religion, love, and loss into a pleasurable conversation, but it’s a conversation without victory or resolution. If there’s hope, the game suggests, it’s in reckoning with our own complicities and in learning the lessons of political history.
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