The biggest thing for me with some of the eat the rich posts I've seen lately, especially those talking about Taylor Swift, is basing judgement off of a net worth score.
(I'm no fan of Taylor Swift, I just know that she barely notched over and only on net worth... which is a junk number, basically a fancy guess how much them and everything they own would sell for, including things like song rights, likeness, etc)
I'll especially note that I don't think any artist really comes close to billionaire earnings without other businesses that are bigger than their art.
Useful reference: * Highest Paid Actor (in a year) - Most years this floats just under $80 million, some rare extreme years see around $200 million * Highest Paid Musician (in a year) - this jumps around alot but in 2022 it was $210 million and peaked in 2014 with Dr Dre at $620 million (next highest was Bruce Springsteen in 2021 for $435 million)
Important note not being a billionaire doesn't mean they can't be exploiting, just that billionaires are guaranteed to be intentionally exploiting.
In the case of artists, they have very little control over most of the things. Actors are contractors with little to no employees and no control over the pay of anyone else. Musicians are tied up in contracts and have a limited list of employees (ie. background dancers), and generally are just hiring venues (the venue provides almost all the workers, and they pretty much all suck of course).
The worst thing about subtitled anime... is that you occasionally forget that you can't understand them, get distracted by something else and then realize you didn't catch anything that happened over the past 5 minutes...
One of the servers went down from hardware failure, thankfully since I run this across multiple boxes with failover it means the site is (obviously) still up.
It might occasionally get a little spotty on connection and especially on performance until that server gets replaced as it means the remaining server is a tad bit overloaded.
It'll probably be a few weeks unfortunately as I don't have the spare funds to pre-purchase a replacement (the protection plan I purchased will cover it, but I've got to mail off the unit, wait for the money, then wait for financial stresses to pass enough that I can order the replacement... then a good week or two delivery time after that)
Eduardo Galeano: Latin America is the region of open veins. Everything, from the discovery until our times, has always been transmuted into European—or later United States—capital, and as such has accumulated in distant centers of power. Everything: the soil, its fruits and its mineral-rich depths, the people and their capacity to work and to consume, natural resources and human resources. Production methods and class structure have been successively determined from outside for each area by meshing it into the universal gearbox of capitalism. To each area has been assigned a function, always for the benefit of the foreign metropolis of the moment, and the endless chain of dependency has been endlessly extended. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Eduardo Galeano: Veneration for the past has always seemed to me reactionary. The right chooses to talk about the past because it prefers dead people: a quiet world, a quiet time. The powerful who legitimize their privileges by heredity cultivate nostalgia. History is studied as if we are visiting a museum; but this collection of mummies is a swindle. They lie to us about the past as they lie to us about the present: they mask the face of reality. They force the oppressed victims to absorb an alien, desiccated, sterile memory fabricated by the oppressor, so that they will resign themselves to a life that isn’t theirs as if it were the only one possible. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Eduardo Galeano: The Latin American cause is about all a social cause: the rebirth of Latin America must start with the overthrow of its masters, country by country. We are entering times of rebellion and change. There are those who believe that destiny rests on the knees of the gods; but the truth is that it confronts the conscience of man with a burning challenge. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Eduardo Galeano: The Revolution is indeed living thorough the hard times of transition and sacrifice. The Cubans themselves have learned that socialism is built with clenched teeth and that revolution is no evening stroll. But afterall, if the future came on a platter, it would not be of this world. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Eduardo Galeano: In these lands we are not experiencing the primitive infancy of capitalism but its vicious senility. Underdevelopment isn't a stage of development, but its consequence. Latin America's underdevelopment arises from external development, and continues to feed it. A system made impotent by its function of international servitude, and moribund since birth, has feet of clay. It pretends to be destiny and would like to be thought eternal. All memory is subversive, because it is different, and likewise any program for the future. The zombie is made to eat without salt: salt is dangerous, it could awaken him. The system has its paradigm in the immutable society of ants. For that reason it accords ill with the history of humankind, because that is always changing. And because in the history of humankind every act of destruction meets its response, sooner or later, in an act of creation. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Eduardo Galeano: Whatever Latin America sells—raw materials or manufactures—its chief export product is really cheap labor. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Eduardo Galeano: The capitalist "head office" can allow itself the luxury of creating and believing its own myths of opulence, but the poor countries on the capitalist periphery know that myths cannot be eaten. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Eduardo Galeano: More freedom is extended to business, the more prisons have to be built for those who suffer from that business. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Eduardo Galeano: But what sort of "national bourgeoisie" was ours, composed of landlords, big wheelers and dealers and speculators, frock-coated politicos and intellectuals of borrowed cultures? Latin America quickly gave birth to bourgeois constitutions well varnished with liberalism, but there was no creative bourgeoisie in the European or U.S. style to accompany them, one which would undertake as its historical mission the development of a strong national capitalism. The bourgeoisies of our countries came into being as mere instruments of international capitalism, liberally oiled cogs in the global mechanism that bled the colonies and semicolonies. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Eduardo Galeano: Marx wrote in Chapter 3 of the first volume of Capital: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Naomi Shulman: Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly and focused on happier things than "politics.". They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: It is not enough that the class struggle be comes real, consistent and developed only when it embraces the sphere of politics. In politics, too, it is possible to restrict oneself to minor matters, and it is possible to go deeper, to the very foundations. Marxism recognises a class struggle as fully developed, “nation-wide”, only if it does not merely embrace politics but takes in the most significant thing in politics—the organisation of state power. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: We know that the opportunists, slaves to the ideas of liberalism, understood these profound words of Marx incorrectly and tried to put a distorted interpretation on them. Among the opportunists there were, for instance, the Economists, the elder brothers of the liquidators. The Economists believed that any clash between classes was a political struggle. The Economists therefore recognised as "class struggle" the struggle for a wage increase of five kopeks on the ruble, and refused to recognise a higher, more developed, nation-wide class struggle, the struggle for political aims. The Economists, therefore, recognised the embryonic class struggle but did not recognise it in its developed form. The Economists recognised, in other words, only that part of the class struggle that was more tolerable to the liberal bourgeoisie, they refused to go farther than the liberals, they refused to recognise the higher form of class struggle that is unacceptable to the liberals. By so doing, the Economists became liberal workers' politicians. By so doing, the Economists rejected the Marxist, revolutionary conception of the class struggle. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The bourgeoisie “want” to curtail the class struggle, to distort and narrow the conception and blunt its sharp edge. The proletariat “wants” this deception exposed. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: On the other hand, the liberals, when the working-class movement has grown a little stronger, dare not deny the class struggle but attempt to narrow down, to curtail and emasculate the concept of class struggle. Liberals are prepared to recognise the class struggle in the sphere of politics, too, but on one condition—that the organisation of state power should not enter into that sphere. It is not hard to under stand which of the bourgeoisie’s class interests give rise to the liberal distortion of the concept of class struggle. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Issac Asimov: There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Thierry Meyssan: The idea that it is possible to “democratise” from the exterior, not only the institutions of a state, but the political practises of a People, is quite simply contradictory and grotesque. For the Trotskyists who run the NED, it is the old fantasy of “world revolution”. The peoples, countries and histories do not matter, the revolution is for all, and the power is for the revolutionary elite. During the Bolshevik revolution, Leon Trotsky and his secretary were encouraged by the British to massacre their compatriots on a massive scale, thus weakening Russia. In the Greater Middle East, his US disciples followed in his footsteps – spouting extreme-left wing gibberish, they organised massive crimes in the service of imperialism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Thierry Meyssan: During the whole of the “Arab Spring”, MI6 specialised in war propaganda. A sensible division of labour, since the use of modern psychology to hoodwink your own population and obtain their support was an English invention, developed well before the USSR and the Third Reich. In 1914, London created the War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House. One of its methods was to use artists, since images are direct and untrammelled by logic. In 1914, they also recruited the great writers of the day – Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling – to publish screeds ascribing imaginary crimes to the German enemy. Then they recruited the editors of their major newspapers to publish the imaginary tales served up by the writers. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Thierry Meyssan: Brzeziński set up “Operation Cyclone” in Afghanistan. Between 17,000 and 35,000 Muslim Brothers from about 40 countries came to fight the USSR, which had come to the defence of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, at its request. There had never been a “Soviet invasion”, as US propaganda pretended. The men of the Brotherhood came to reinforce a local coalition of conservative combatants and the local Muslim Brotherhood, including the Pashtun Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Tajik Ahmad Shah Massoud. They received the major part of their armament from Israel – officially their sworn enemy, but now their partner. All these forces were commanded from Pakistan by General Muhammad Zia-ul- Haq, and financed by the United States and Saudi Arabia. This was the first time that the Brotherhood had been used by the Anglo-Saxons to wage war. Among the combatants present were the future commanders of the wars in the Caucasus, of the Indonesian Jemaah Islamiyah, the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines, and of course al-Qaeda and Daesh. In the United States, the anti-Soviet operation was supported by the Republican Party and a small group from the extreme left, the Trotskyists of Social Democrats USA. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Fidel Castro: Imperial plans of domination are preceded by huge sums assigned to the tasks of lying and misinforming public opinion. They have the total complicity of the oligarchy, the bourgeoisie, the intellectual right and the mass media of dissemination. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Gramsci: To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is to achieve a communist and revolutionary act. The formula “dictatorship of the proletariat” must cease to be only a formula, an occasion for outbursts of revolutionary phraseology. Whoever wants the ends, should want the means. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the inauguration of a new state, typically proletarian, in which combine the institutional experiences of the oppressed class, in which the social life of the worker and peasant class becomes a widespread and strongly organized system. This state is not improvised: the Russian Bolshevik communists have worked for eight months to propagate and make concrete the watchword: all power to the soviets, and the soviets have been known to Russian workers since 1905. The communists must treasure the Russian experience and save time and effort: the work of reconstruction will require for itself much time and much effort, to which every day and every act must be destined. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: The exchange value of a commodity estimated in money is called its price. Wages therefore are only a special name for the price of labour-power, and are usually called the price of labour; it is the special name for the price of this peculiar commodity, which has no other repository than human flesh and blood. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Samir Amin: Nowadays capitalism in its long-lasting period of decline is ruled by an oligarchy. Unless the political power of this capitalist oligarchy is broken down, all political and social struggles won't show any results. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: Consequently, labour-power is a commodity which its possessor, the wage-worker, sells to the capitalist. Why does he sell it? It is in order to live. But the putting of labour-power into action – i.e., the work – is the active expression of the labourer's own life. And this life activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of life. His life-activity, therefore, is but a means of securing his own existence. He works that he may keep alive. He does not count the labour itself as a part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity that he has auctioned off to another. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Kim Il Sung: For the Korean revolution to be victorious there must be a Marxist-Leninist party as the General Staff of the revolution. Only a revolutionary party can formulate a correct line, strategy and tactics, mobilize the broad masses for struggle against the Japanese imperialists, and build a socialist and communist society. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Steven Weinberg: With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Confused
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