People care when their drinking water is contaminated with lead. They care if their medicines aren’t safe and effective, or if somebody takes all the money out of their investment accounts. Those things don’t make people happy. Yet it’s administrative agencies that are guarding against that and protecting their rights. So when the Supreme Court starts to dismantle important features of these agencies, it matters because it’s destabilizing a really important part of government
It’s really very, very simple.
Regulation of things like pollution serves the interests of the people broadly, but undermines the interests of a handful of obscenely wealthy sociopaths.
And much of the current Supreme Court explicitly works NOT to serve the interests of the people broadly, but to serve the interests of the obscenely wealthy sociopaths.
And that’s it, right there. Just as has happened in numerous past civilizations, the power structure in the US has become so warped and corrupted - so entirely in the control of sociopaths - that it not only no longer even pretends to serve the interests of the people, but tends to explicitly work against their interests.
And the hell of it is that the ruling class is so far gone in corruption and shallow self-interest - so sincerely deeply mentally ill - that they don’t recognize that ultimately they’re working against their own interests - that serving the interests of the people maintains the health of the society from which they benefit, and that working against the interests of the people undermines that health. Like any other mindless parasite, they’re going to destroy their host, and in so doing, ultimately destroy themselves.
And the US will just be added to the ever-growing list of societies destroyed through the machinations of a relative few profoundly mentally ill people granted undue wealth and power.
To further your point, I’ve never understood why American billionaires want us to be more like Russia. Yes, it will make line go up in the short term. Do they know what happens to Russian billionaires? They have a tendency to fall out of windows.
I don’t know why they think they can get one of those without the other.
Welp, that about sums it up.
America has an oligarch problem
Humanity has an oligarch problem… We aren’t the first, and I’d be surprised to hear we were the last.
Have you seen my can of Oligarch-B-Gone?
I come across this sort of comment more and more - the fact that sociopath billionaires extending their influence to the political and judicial system are, in fact, mentally ill.
Believe me, they’re not.
They know very well what they are doing. It’s just that their wealth isolates them from the consequences of it. They don’t care about healthcare, climate change, education, unemployment, because that’s for the 95% to worry about. They are rich enough to don’t give a fuck, and they feel safe doing so.
And that rather obviously describes someone who’s rather obviously mentally ill.
Specifically, they lack empathy and have little to no conscience, so have little to no concern for the harm their decisions might cause to others. Those are the hallmarks of both antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy.
They have a conscience, they have empathy, it’s just that they only do for their friends, families or people in their social circles.
Most people act like this. There are people working in terrible conditions in Bangladesh or China to create stuff the western countries buy at Walmart, forever 21, Amazon… Where’s the empathy for them? Where’s the empathy for the guy that lost his job 6 months ago and has been sleeping in a tent since, and only got 75 cents after 2 hours of panhandling?
Individually, we can’t help everyone so we often look the other way. That doesn’t make us psychopaths.
Furthermore, saying rich people have mental illness frames the problem as a psychological one when in reality it is a socio-economic problem that requires a political solution.
It was a good(?) run
Mm… sort of.
The US had the enormous advantage of starting its life with material resources of which most can only dream, so it couldn’t help but achieve some fairly significant success, and as long as things were relatively easy, it generally did. But it never quite managed to pull its head out of its ass. Its material advantages made it so that it generally managed to get by in spite of the fact that it’s head was firmly lodged up its own ass, but that also meant that it never learned anything. So it just stayed in a diminishing circle of bad decisions until it reached a point at which smart decisions were necessary, and it revealed itself to be mostly incapable of making them.
And at the moment, it’s actually subject to a mass movement that lauds the days of the bad decisions as the good old days, since the people still have their heads too far up their asses and can’t recognize the reality that they were always bad decisions, that the prosperity that accompanied them was simply due to the US’s enormous material advantages and in spite of, rather than because of, the bad decisions, and that a return to those bad decisions in an era in which those material advantages have been squandered is just going to make things even worse.
Which, granted, is still sort of a “good run” - much smarter people have still failed to do even close to as well, since they were stuck starting out with pretty much nothing but disadvantages.
But one can’t help but wonder what could’ve been had we not had our heads so firmly lodged up our asses…