46 points

I said this on Reddit and they agreed that you don’t deserve to be alive if you’re not working, it’s really a disease of the mind to believe this shit.

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-2 points

I could see why tho. What happens today is not the same as this ideal probably. You could argue that if your a fit, 20s, healthy, etc. and you just sit home all day, your kinda a waste, but then again siting somewhere else 9-5 is also a waste so.

Eh, I can see why would someone think that. There are things that I disagree with more.

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55 points

I mean it does make sense if you keep in mind that we traded having to hunt and forage for a system that let’s you buy these things indirectly with currency.

You just need to leave out the whole thing of empathy and morality and reduce the whole system to a exchange of goods and services for money.

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10 points

It’s more like you haven’t earned the right for other people to do the work of keeping you alive.

Human life requires work to sustain. Someone has to do that work. The most fair system is one in which that responsibility falls on the person benefitting from it.

ie, to be alive, you must contribute work. Because your life requires work to maintain.

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2 points
*

I’m so torn on this meme because on the one hand I have the same gut reaction of “yeah, but youll die if you don’t do jack shit in the woods, you kind of have to be useful to live”.

But then I think about our society … the billions of dollars going to rich people who do nothing, the millions of people who work in jobs that are useless, or the millions who work jobs that actively harm society, and in that context, the amount and type of work does seem like bullshit. It’s not like going into your marketing firm 5/7 days of your life means a farmer gets to work less. People like to comfort themselves with vain thoughts like ‘we all just gotta do our partfor the system to work’, but that’s objectively not true. Lots of parts of our system are objectively bullshit and are excised completely through new laws and legislation and society keeps working fine, in some cases much better.

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16 points

There is a difference between believing everyone owes a debt to the society and civilization you participate in to support those who cannot support themselves, and not deserving to live if you didn’t fit into the rigid hierarchy structures we’ve built for work. But often these sentiments get mixed together.

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-4 points

I don’t think they do. In our society we don’t really let people die just because they don’t fit in. When there’s someone who can’t take care of their self, we take care of them.

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10 points

Where are you talking about and comparing to what? Cause I see a lot of people dying in the streets because of mental illness or drug addiction when I take the subway to work. We don’t throw them away like ancient Sparta but we definitely don’t come close to providing the services they need to the things they need to begin to get off the street. Cause the solution now is put the homeless in prison and that’s going just fine right? …Right?

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-3 points

Lmao. What fairy tale society do you live in?

As a selfish conservative you should already know that they are the exact ones who want to steal every single security net from every citizen whilst simultaneously enabling corporations to destroy unions and create monopolies.

I mean c’mon, you have to know this. It’s the core tenet of the traitor supporting party. Thieving, stealing, cheating, and lying are all that the magat traitors have to offer.

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2 points
*

This meme is mainly talking about workers who are worked to death to “earn a living”. Capitalists who leech off of workers do not deserve to be alive.

Of course, that’s not the case for those who are physically unable to work to the same extent as others. Basically, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

We have more than enough resources for everyone, so long as the working class can control the means of production instead of the capitalists who try to hoard all the wealth.

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6 points

“Earning a living” doesn’t state that people should die if the choose to be a grifter or a thief or some other dishonest person that takes from others and doesn’t contribute to society. It just means those people didn’t earn their living.

In a functional society everyone should contribute to better the society. “Earning a living” is a statement of pride in contributing to society value equal to or greater than the value you get from it. If someone is making a living through dishonest means so isn’t earning a living, it can be something they should be ashamed of

Note that socialist societies have similar expressions like “from each according to their ability to each according to their need”. The intent is the same, encourage people to contribute to society. What if I don’t contribute according to my ability and just want to take what I need? Does that statement imply I’ll be sent to a gulag if I don’t contribute according to my ability? OMG socialism says I don’t deserve to live!!!

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30 points

I mean if you think about it, the default of humanity is to die of thirst assuming we were to do nothing so ‘earning a living’ is just a realistic expectation for any society.

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16 points

If able, you should provide enough to society to make it worth meeting your basic needs. They give you food, water, shelter, you give them back enough to compensate them for that effort.

At its root, this is what cash should be, a measure of what society owes you. You make other people’s lives X much better, and they do the same for you.

We should really be trying harder to get cash to meet this goal. A person making 60k a year for 45 years is $2.7 million dollars. You can buy a person’s lifetime of effort for $2.7 million.

Bill Gates is worth $131 billion. That’s the lifetime effort of 48,500 people. He hasn’t improved our lives that much. Something is clearly out of sorts. There’s nothing one person can do to deserve the lifetime effort of a thousand people.

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2 points

Being evil pays really well. Sometimes.

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4 points

How much time has personal computing saved in your life? Are you really sure Gates hasn’t produced 48k lifetimes worth of saved time by his efforts?

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2 points

It doesn’t matter. One person can’t put forth 48k lifetimes worth of effort, and they don’t deserve that much in return.

I promise the dude hasn’t worked harder than the combined efforts of 48 thousand people.

We can reward talent, and we can reward effort. But no combination of those two is as ridiculous as our reward structure. Our reward structure is flawed because people with money make the rules, and their primary rule is that people with money should have more money.

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-1 points

To answer this question seriously, Bill Gates has held back computing by stealing other people’s work and ideas and using Embrace Extend and Extinguish.

If Bill Gates had no existed, arguably open source computing and hardware would be even more advanced than what we have now. Windows has been a net detriment to society.

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1 point

Everyone died before computers, it’s a fact.

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-5 points

If you follow that reasoning, the ultimate conclusion is that it’s perfectly fine to let sick or disabled people die.

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4 points

Let them … well yes eventually you will have to let them, as you can’t stop them.

Forcing them along that path though, yeah that’s not cool.

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-1 points
*

I don’t see what point you’re trying to make, unless you think I need a reindeer reminder that everyone eventually dies.

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18 points

Thank you Mr. Skeletor. It is important to get the occasional outside perspective on living from an undead evil villain. Nyeh.

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31 points
*

Talking to someone who justifies this kinda shit is always a trip. They’ll say that people who aren’t earning a living wage just need to work harder and pick up a marketable skill to improve their situation. But you can simultaneously get them to agree that many of these low wage “unskilled” jobs need to exist for society to continue functioning, so which fucking is it?

The answer is that the capitalist parasites and their horde of boot lickers believe it’s totally acceptable for there to exist an underclass of human beings born to work until their bodies give out for the enrichment of their superior employer.

They can’t afford to live a dignified life doing the shit I need them to do? That’s fine, just toss 'em into the hole when they stop working and replace them with the next generation.

Honestly man, I’m getting real sick and tired of pretending to be above violent retribution when it comes to these people. My blood fucking boils each and every time I need to look my boss in the eye and pretend to smile as they say farcical shit like “we’re all a family here” or “let us know if there’s anything you need” while paying me exactly the minimum wage and hiring the exact number of employees it takes for them to avoid giving any of us enough hours to qualify for benefits.

Anyway, Stalin had the right idea with gulags, and we should bring those back. Thanks for coming to my TED talk

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2 points

Anyway, Stalin had the right idea with gulags, and we should bring those back.

Very edgy. Straight outta 4chan

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33 points
*

lmao this lemmitors comparing Hexbear users to 4channers shit never gets old. When you liberals meet someone far to your left it must really break your brain for you to lump us in with fascists.

You know what I almost never see referred to as edgy out of hand? People who don’t want to fully abolish the US prison system, which to this day kills far more people far more often than the Soviet gulag system did shortly after the end of WW2. And that’s really strange considering the US prison system is designed from the ground up to maintain a pool of slave labor by incarcerating racial minorities on bullshit drug offenses. Personally, I’d much rather prison be used to keep dangerous reactionaries from causing trouble while they’re being reeducated.

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3 points
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Look mate I don’t live in USA, I have nothing to do with USA. I was commenting on your stupid ass glorification of forced labor camps in soviet shithole

And you clearly don’t seem to have problem with US prison system, only that wrong people are sent there. You’re as full of shit as the people you think you’re criticizing. You’d rather be yelling at people not loving your dear dictators than actually trying to do anything good for the world.

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Nah, you’re just being a weenie.

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30 points

This is where the idea of “personal responsibility” is useful for liberals. Flatly admitting that they want a desperate underclass is too mask off for them to feel like good people so they invent a way of blaming individual victims rather than the economic system.

The poor has a theoretical opportunity to pull themselves up by the bootstraps so when they don’t do that it’s really their own fault. Of course that theoretical opportunity doesn’t translate into actual opportunity for most people but that’s fine, as there’s enough window dressing of meritocracy to make the opportunity look real if you are careful not to go into too much detail.

This is also the reason why liberals hate discussing real-world examples. Their logic only works in abstract thought experiments where they get to control the variables. Saying that everyone has the opportunity to succeed is a lot easier than saying that Bob, who has a set of very concrete and undeniable material conditions, has the opportunity succeed.

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-2 points
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You really had to go and ruin it by praising Stalin right there at the end, didn’t you… 🤦‍♀️

(to be clear - eat the fucking rich, but that’s not what gulags are for)

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1 point

eat the fucking rich, but that’s not what gulags are for

The “fucking rich” / bourgeois are to be shot, not sent to gulags. That’s for the idiots supporting capitalism.

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36 points

I’m pro unconditional basic income, but I would argue that it’s more about you having to make sure you have everything you need yourself. No one would say to someone who lives completely self-sufficient that he needs “to earn a living”.

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