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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I grew up rich and inherited my wealth and I’m still a leftist, so I know there are exceptions to the rule I just gave. I didn’t mean to imply that all rich people are conservative and it’s a function of wealth. I just meant that while many leftists on Lemmy demand the rich empathize with the poor, I don’t think enough of them empathize with the rich—particularly the self-made rich.

    You wanna know what the best thing about my inherited wealth is? I don’t have to plan for retirement. This leaves me free to work a job that doesn’t pay well, but affords me the opportunity to help people less fortunate than me (community therapist). I don’t think enough leftists on Lemmy realize how many of us are out there. It’s the problem of a handful of bad actors spoiling things for the bunch. It doesn’t matter how many Warren Buffets are out there; a single Jeff Bezos sets the bad example.

    But it’s the system. We need laws that prevent 90% of the wealth falling into 10% of the hands. We need laws that stop the richest from paying the least taxes. But we also need oversight committees that stop government bodies meant to help the poor from pocketing the money—something leftists rarely want to acknowledge happens. I work in public health and I know how corrupt the system is. We can’t expect the we’ll-meaning wealthy to give up their capital to a system that is designed to line the pockets of other rich people.






  • Tedesche@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldWhat's your Star Trek hot take?
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    5 days ago

    Energy-to-(organic)matter conversion + futuristic power generators makes feeding your population a triviality. That simplifies just about any economic system, which takes a lot of the complicated stuff out of government and class hierarchies.

    But Star Trek is a fictional utopia, much like Communism.

    In reality, corruption would still mess up government in a “real world” Star Trek. I’m a casual Trekkie, but I don’t recall much detail about the Federation’s or Earth’s government structure. Do people still vote? Is it a benevolent military dictatorship? Who knows? And who cares? It’s not really relevant to the themes of the shows.

    Star Trek is founded on liberal ideas popular in the mid-20th century that humanity could achieve unity and peace if it just cast aside superficial differences like race and gender, allowing us to focus on exploring the universe once we’d gotten over fighting each other. That’s the very core of the entire franchise and I’m fine leaving it that way, unscrutinized, since it clearly doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It’s like how the force is best left a mystical property of the universe in Star Wars, rather than science-ized with medichlorians.