These are inverted in the U.$. aren’t they? I don’t buy into Pinker’s claims that we are doing just fine on the global stage. It’s a neat perspective to flip things over, but it does nothing to move anything. We could be doing much better in terms of egality.
Our very proteins are folding in strange new ways due to trace amounts of novel chemicals provided by our new technologies. Corporations who make such chemicals would be on the hook for the rise in such health effects, and if substantial enough would end the existence of that business, and so payoffs make sense to such an exorbitant extent that protections are found through legislation. Capitalism touches law regularly. This then yields the $600 epi-pen, which by the way would not have such need as it does today a century ago. Peanut butter on crackers was a snack for everyone. Try that today and you’d better be ready to shell out a couple thousand dollars for a decent sized class of second graders.
The political optics of capitalism, it could be argued, do actually require a propaganda state to hold things together. Of course this type of captitalism deserves a flavor assignment, but it is definitely ours. The pharmaceutical companies; supposed masters of chemistry there to help us… for a price… caught on a ladder of competition that lands our media swamped in their funding; listening to adds that have to list the potential side effects of a drug… what sort of psychological system is this? And then a failed vaccine gets protection at every level… then you hear that the manufacturers actually are on the hook, but then due to some recent legislation they are off the hook again… I don’t believe that the chaos that we witness comes from anywhere but our own system. I do witness the chaos, and it would be nice to blame the Russians, and I’m quite certain that we have caused them great chaos in the past, and so the reciprocal could be true, yet provably we’ve got a system that is free-running and eating its own tail.
The problem of corruption as a basic tenet; and of course methods of prevention; seems to me a basic lens to develop some optics. Clearly elections do still matter; otherwise we wouldn’t see such a work over on candidates. It’s lovely political theater, and to falsify the attacks is so easily done: just truly listen to the words of each candidate as directly as you can, and judge for yourself how you fell about them. Throw away all the rest. You could even try this with the world leaders, though it will require some translation. As to where the cool heads lay who are actually in control: it’s not here. Not in the U.$.A.
FAFA!
- In Godzilla We Trust