Already the most disliked man in America, Zuckerberg will show with his next era whether he believes in anything as much as he does power. Was his interest in jiu-jitsu mixed martial arts authentic or a way to ingratiate himself with the manosphere’s podcast hosts? We may know by the time he faces his first inquest. Perhaps he’ll return to the liberal roots of his former public image like founding a pro-immigration nonprofit, as he did a decade ago.

    • MagicShel@lemmy.zip
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      2 hours ago

      I’m not down for murdering folks without due process. That being said, if one dispassionately measures the good done vs the harm caused, throwing every billionaire into the sea — even the “good ones” — the math suggests more good would be done then harm. Sometimes it’s difficult to reconcile the morality of not murdering them.

      We need a shitload of Luigis to take the moral hit, leaving the rest of us to be innocently outraged. I, for one, would be the first to write a sternly worded online comment.

  • SecretiveVault@lemmy.zip
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    3 hours ago

    Hopefully the Democrats won’t chicken out and regulate the fuck out of them. Break Google, Meta, X, all of them up. Tax the fuck out of them.

  • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    They’ll cozy up to the Dems. It’s not rocket science. All the corporations pay both parties to further their interests, due to the most idiotic ruling in history: citizens united, which effectively decided that legally in the US, money = speech.

    • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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      3 hours ago

      It’s known as a plutocracy … a political system based on money and wealth

      As compared to a democracy … a political system based on the will of the people.

      America has always worked like the first and it’s debated as to whether or not it ever was the second.

      • DjangoFett@lemmy.zip
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        2 hours ago

        Just in case anyone is curious as to what you mean, here’s a brief historical context.

        Up until Trump and adjusting for inflation, George Washington was the wealthiest president in history with his net worth contributing an actual percentage of the US wealth at the time. I mean, we were still getting national loans to the tune of a few million dollars per deal and that was considered adequate at the time.

        Jefferson used the White House as his personal palace while he was President and spent as much time throwing dinner parties and receiving guests in his dressing gown as being President and trying to undo everything Hamilton left behind out of pure spite.

        It wasn’t until damn near Lincoln (1828) that your average man was able to vote, as only those who owned land were considered educated enough to have a say in government, and when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation we had the “who can vote” conversation all over again, and then once more and with feeling for the women after that.

        • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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          6 minutes ago

          I’m in Canada and I have this debate often with my friends. One prime example is our federal governments Westminster system of government … where we have a house of parliament filled with elected officials from across the country, who can draw up, debate issues and pass laws … but then those laws are sent to a senate that provides ‘a sober second thought’ to everything … the senate is filled with unelected officials that are placed there by appointment.

          Historically, the senate was just filled with friends and associates by the ruling government at the time … basically it meant that every democratic law in the country was first given over to unelected elites and business friendly people to water down anything that went through government … in recent decades, they’ve modernized the system and now it is still appointed people but appointed through a system disassociated with individual political parties or political leaders - apparently senators are appointed by committee

          But its still filled with heavily influential people with money and monied interests … they keep arguing that any canadian citizen can be appointed but it never happens because you have to be a fairly wealthy individual, have influence and know lots of people before you could ever be considered for appointment … one of the prerequisites they point out is that individuals considered for appointment must own a minimum wealth of $4,000 (or something like that, I forget the actual figure but it was only a few thousand dollars), which most will argue is not a barrier to many in this day in age. What they don’t point out is that $4,000 in 1867 when the country was founded was equivalent to saying someone should own roughly almost a million dollars in wealth. It was always geared and built into the system to have wealthy overseers watch over the country and protect the wealth of the most powerful people.

          Which makes you question, like I do with America, whether we ever did have a democratic system here in Canada

  • schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works
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    4 hours ago

    Dems have a fuckton more house clearing to do before billionaires need to worry about a fucking thing, but at least it will go faster now because a lot more Dems will need to vote against in order to prevent passage, instead of the one-off “take one for the team” carousel of status-quo enablers.

  • trashboat@piefed.social
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    3 hours ago

    I’m wondering if they’ll deliberately hit the button that pops the AI bubble during this Congress to try and convince people that progressives can’t manage the economy