BF2S Forums The Dead Pool

olof palme reference was clearly a joke allusion. i see the sense of humour is still under development, all these years later. version 0.782 now?

unless the pun on ‘buzzfeed’ was your attempt at a joke? shudder.

anyway. wonder what to make of this additional detail that apparently the assassin left a backpack full of monopoly money in central park. possibly related to the insider trading case opened against the CEO? could still be a hit motivated by big business shenanigans, and not some folk-hero kicking against the pricks of the health system.

Last edited by uziq (2024-12-09 00:48:11)

dilbert not even young people of my generation who used buzzfeed have mentioned or thought of that site since 2011. it was uncool even then. it has disappeared into the cultural memory hole. making a pun out of ‘being familiar with current trends’ about a site that has been irrelevant since obama’s first term is … dumb actually.

yes, the whole logic of my joke was ‘wow! a street assassination! that’s just like the olde times’.

i guess it’s for the best you never go out and socialise with human beings. you’d be a riot at a party.

Last edited by uziq (2024-12-09 00:51:51)

keep on fingering that buzzfeed, dilbs.

it's interesting because it's one of those emotive issues (the toxic healthcare industry) that shines through the day-to-day false consciousness of the majority of american's relationship to their so-called 'conservatism'. most of the time they're fine identifying with the rich and successful, even if they are the blue-collar little guy that continually gets trodden on by wall street and capitol hill, in that 'temporarily embarassed millionaires' kind of way. worse, they often get enlisted into the culture wars on the behalf of the rich billionaire class who fund all sorts of quacky quangos and thinktanks and whatever else to keep the peons distracted.

but on this matter they can clearly see that their conservative talking heads on TV and paymasters side emphatically with the super-rich who would deny their children life-saving medical care if they could get away with it. evidently they have been doing so behind the distancing trick of AI algorithms making verdicts on claims, etc.

Last edited by uziq (2024-12-09 11:49:28)

uziq wrote:

'temporarily embarassed millionaires'

The average person does dream of escaping the problem of not having money.

The really interesting part is they're so sure they are going to get there they want to deny their fellow paupers any reasonable benefits before they've even made it themselves, even though this affects them directly.
Its a very strange kind of delusion which exposes people's inherent stupidity and cruelty.

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:

'temporarily embarassed millionaires'

The average person does dream of escaping the problem of not having money.

The really interesting part is they're so sure they are going to get there they want to deny their fellow paupers any reasonable benefits before they've even made it themselves, even though this affects them directly.
Its a very strange kind of delusion which exposes people's inherent stupidity and cruelty.

i don’t think that describes the average person at all. it’s cultural. many cultures have drilled it into people from a young age that being exorbitantly wealthy is somehow shameful and antisocial (which, at a certain point, it manifestly is). and i’m not just talking about in western christian cultures either, with all that eye of needle kingdom of heaven stuff.

most of social democratic europe are cool with a social contract that prioritises high taxation and the commonweal. there’s deep cultural bases for that beyond the modern nation state. look at the ‘janteloven’ in scandinavian societies generally. it’s a white equivalent of the japanese dictum about ‘the nail that sticks out must be hammered down’. the desire to be filthy rich in a winner-takes-all system really doesn’t turn everyone on.

obviously in today’s world of material plenty and with advertising and luxury and glamour stuffed down our throats 24/7, everyone is seduced in some way or other. and who wouldn’t want to live in the big house with a nice view etc. but the ‘we can all be billionaires if we pull up our bootstraps’ seems like a particular component of the american dream that they’re not selling in, say, aarhus or sapporo. lagos and shanghai, maybe.

the ironic thing here is the CEO who got whacked was basically from iowa farming stock, born into nothing, went to a state college, etc., and really did just work his way up into the highest echelons of the business elite in 1 generation. the kid that shot him was from intergenerational wealth and went to a prep school and an ivy. even with its rampant inequality and issues with social mobility, america can still serve us up with a j. d. vance or a frat-house assassin.

Last edited by uziq (2024-12-10 00:42:47)

to clarify, here, i'm refuting the idea that everyone carries around a version of that particularly american ideal of being a 'temporarily embarrassed millionaire'. what you said, 'not worrying about money', is substantively different, i think. one is part of a sort of evangelical gospel of success; the other is just not wanting to be permanently stressed or anxious. obviously every human wants to disappear money worries for their and their children's future.

and i mentioned ‘social contract’ up front in my last reply. the whole point of society is to build with whatever that starting ‘nature’ is and to collaborate to greater goods/ends than the self. i’m just pointing out that there’s a big diversity in how cultures view that sort of naked greed and accumulation. world religions as well as social codes have dealt with it in differing ways.

i don’t want to get into the reeds with you with your usual ‘evolutionary psychology’ gobbledigook about ‘human nature’, anyway. it’s always so vague. ‘man was worried about finding mammoth to eat 15,000 years ago in difficult ice age. man steals bitcoin from friend in last crypto cycle’. ok pal. whatever.

historically it would make far more sense to talk about how capitalism has engendered this behaviour. there’s plenty of examples of humans literally still IN nature today on the planet who haven’t gone down the long path of accumulating resources. there’s a long tradition of unhappy western anthropologists going to papua new guinea or the amazon to scratch their heads over this. capitalism is the engine both of our development and our rapaciousness. yes, you can add imperialism as a historical phenomenon to that too, although i know the term gives you conniptions. let’s not pretend every human society on earth has gone down that path ‘because it’s human nature to accumulate and exploit’.

and i am not saying rich people don’t exist in those other cultures. i am just saying that there’s a helluva lot of people in countries like japan or the nordic states who are loaded into life with a ROM that doesn’t cast everything in materialistic acquisition mode. it is very culturally specific. upper-middle class french people in paris signal their status and find contentment in very different ways to tech bros in silicon valley. not everyone is going to work each day dreaming of owning a tesla cybertruck or porsche. there’s entire bourgeois elites in european countries who don’t think like that (for better or for worse; people with intergenerational wealth can afford to espouse those values now all the imperial amassing is safely in the past; i’m not passing judgment on which culture is best here).

Last edited by uziq (2024-12-10 01:28:19)

no disagreements there.

and yes, this sort of thing is as old as civilisation itself.

the oldest ever evidence we have of writing is essentially a complaint over breach of contract and poor delivery of service. and here we have a healthcare CEO who was up until his untimely demise under investigation by the DOJ for insider trading, while overseeing the systemic stiffing of clients on their insurance policies.

You have to not act crazy until after the 'not guilty' verdict.

"OK WTF", yeah, i agreed with the first two lines of your post, before you edited in a bunch of stuff that you write yourself is specific to america.

most people don't want to get rich at the expense of stepping over their vanquished enemies and homeless people.

there absolutely are sociopaths who thrive in these systems, but it isn't generalisable to 'most people'. when you start accusing the whole society of being sick and cynical, it's normally a projection of yourself. you are pretty misanthropic on the overall scale, dilbs. the majority of the world's population don't live in cut-throat capitalism or with a 'grindset', 'min/max', 'winner takes all' outlook. spend some time in a more collective, communitarian or high-trust society.

it's not necessarily 'human nature' at all. as usual, your stuff couched in the pseudo-scientific jargon of evolutionary psych is vague and ahistorical.

Last edited by uziq (2024-12-11 03:56:38)

anyway. has anyone actually seen assad since he was 'granted exile' in russia?

there was briefly a lot of chatter about a plane going down in syria during the exit. a decoy or ruse with turned off transponders?