Oh! That is a good point. I shouldn’t say the problem is money, (especially since I call this mini-monologue I’m trying to develop “The Problem is Growth”)

My goal with that whole comment was to describe money’s tendency to grow without limit. And I was under the impression, even as I posted, that I need a lot more practice before I can deliver a simple paragraph that can capture and convey the dangers I see in growth.

To answer your question, no. Money is not material value. Money is an abstract representation of value. Not a “store” of it (as I called it). It’s separated from the material and labor value it represents. And in fact, it’s probably that separation that makes it capable of the dangerous, cancerous growth that I am so wary of.

I would actually argue that money – and not human nature – is the point of failure. To be more specific, money’s capacity for growth.

The second you have the growth associated with a store of value (the ability to spend $100 and get back $110), you have the capacity for different piles of value to grow at different rates (depending on things like luck, ruthlessness, and cleverness) without being limited by a single human’s ability to labor.

And when you have different piles of money growing at different rates with no upper limit, you have some growing so fast that they become cancerous, sucking the resources out of the entire system.

It’s both better and worse having this problem than having one of human nature. Worse because growth is an even more universal part of nature than greed. (So we can’t get rid of it.) Better because it’s something we are intimately familiar with trying to contain. We have surgeries for rapid cellular growths. We have antibiotics for rapid bacterial growths. We have entire forestry organizations that release hunting licenses dedicated to containing rapid deer population growth.

Growth is an incredibly simple, two-dimensional graph, and it’s easy to tell when we’re controlling a growth vs succumbing to it.

The meme said, “the means of production.” It did not say, “every, single means of production.”

The OP could have meant anything from workers electing their CEOs in 51% of the steel mills, smelteries, oil rigs, cinemas, restaurants, etc. all the way up to 100% like you decided to assume.

But honestly, it makes very little sense to read 100% into this, especially with your wording of “good or service-providing entity”.

A hell of a lot of “good or service-providing entities” are sole proprietorships, which are in a blurry gray area between private ownership and cooperative ownership. On the one hand, many capitalists started out as sole proprietors. On the other hand, by owning one’s own means of production, a sole proprietor is both worker and owner, fitting perfectly in the definition of socialism. In fact, I would argue that the sole proprietor doesn’t really become a socialist or a capitalist until another worker joins the business and it becomes a cooperative or a private company. Until then, the distinction is meaningless.

The man’s cult extends far beyond America’s borders. Just like the “anti-woke” culture war.

She has #47 now. Who needs a pope?

Are their last words going to be “see? You were overreacting.” right before someone pushes a button on their gas chamber?

Or have they already booked their tickets to some recently-confiscated house in the West Bank?

It has a delicious sort of passive aggressive vibe to it.

Did the alleged “slum lords” lose against the actual slum lords’ smear campaign?

I wouldn’t be surprised if they called developers “terrorists” at some point.

NIMBY property owners are so convinced of the righteousness of their assets – and of the evil lurking within any effort to slightly slow down their appreciating value – that I don’t think there’s a level of wickedness that exceeds a threat to those assets.

Like, I wouldn’t be surprised if they thought: “these developers are worse than Bin Laden. At least Bin Laden didn’t decrease the worth of MY property.”

When the argument against an initiative says, “greedy developers” that is just a populist NIMBY smear spoken by even greedier, already-existing landlords.

I actually voted against a housing development one time because I got played by those words. I’m a little wiser now.

Oops. Sorry about that. I opened the Voyager app and found an unsent reply, and was like, “I thought I sent this.”

And I hit send.

But apparently, if you’ve had the Voyager web app minimized… and come back to it after 30-40 minutes… AND hit send… it might just reply to a totally unrelated comment in the same post.

Maybe he killed his first enemy combatant and realized he wasn’t a soldier?

I’m glad you got a good upvote:downvote ratio for that post. It’s encouraging to know that people are at least willing to listen to a reasonable take on Taylor Swift.

People have been hating Swift for decades now. They were hating her for writing too many relationship-related songs even before the American left revived.

She’s an easy target because her target demographic is teenage girls, and anything / anyone beloved by teenage girls MUST necessarily be gay and worthless.

See also: Justin Bieber, the Backstreet Boys, and the Jonas Brothers.

I highly suspect people joined the left and transferred their hatred from, “Taylor Swift the musician for stupid, hysterical girls, who I hate” to, “Taylor Swift, the billionaire,” without once examining the lens through which they first started hating her. And now she gets more “anti-billionaire” hate than Jeff Bezos?

It bothers me.

Misogyny is a tool of capitalism, and to quote Lorde: the tools of the master will never dismantle the master’s house. No one is destroying capitalism by weirdly fixating on Taylor Swift and her fans “because she’s a billionaire” while criticizing her more than basically all other billionaires.

I look forward to the day I see a leftist meme reminding me “you can’t love Bruce Springsteen (1.1b) or Jay-Z (2.5b) and still be a leftist.”

Until then, I’m not taking lectures on leftism from people who haven’t deconstructed their own feelings of hatred and superiority towards teenage girls.

Edit: I hope I didn’t come across as angry at you in particular. You don’t seem to be joining in the hypocritical, unnuanced hate.

To tell any other story in the Star Wars universe, you must first retcon the Original Trilogy.

See, the Original Trilogy established that the “dark side” was a temptation for every Jedi. Like cocaine or meth for modern humans: addictive poison that gives a temporary rush of power.

That’s great for the whole spiritual, mystic, two-wolves-within-you conflict Luke went through. His victory was overcoming his shortcomings in the form of fear and anger.

But it’s actually terrible for any story made afterwards.

On the one hand, you can’t now make a story where, “maybe the Jedi were excessively stoic.” without also inadvertently making the argument that Luke was maybe… wrong?.. to conquer his emotions? It undermines Luke’s conflict.

On the other hand, you also can’t make the Dark Side totally evil without flattening Vader’s character. When Luke loses himself to fear in Episode 5 and to anger in Episode 6, he proves that the Dark Side doesn’t sink its teeth into you and control you permanently after a single moment of weakness. Even after losing yourself to the Dark Side, you can still observe how it is hurting your loved ones and then choose to pull yourself out of it, conquering your fear and anger in order to protect them. Exactly as Luke does for Vader, and exactly as Vader does immediately after for Luke.

Which means Anakin was just… one-dimensional up until that point. Weak. Too simple to be a protagonist. He wakes up to find he’s killed Padme, and yet still doesn’t turn his life around and learn to fight the temptation of the Dark Side? He hunts down and kills Jedi who had nothing to do with his fall, and yet never looks into their eyes to realize he’s fallen?

No matter how you look at it, it just… doesn’t work.

That’s why the prequels retconned the Jedi into something morally ambiguous. And why the sequels retconned them into a past that needed killing. It’s why the Clone Wars animated series turned the Jedi into a bureaucratically anti-emotion order. And why a lot of video games added lore where the Jedi actually committed genocide against the Sith. It’s also why pretty much none of these other media talk about the Dark Side in the same tone as the OT.

The second the OT ended, the Dark Side could no be longer a “temptation”. It had to became a faction. An unjustly vilified piece of humanity. An ethnic group.

Because you can’t have a “dark side” and have complicated, nuanced characters and extensive world-building: either A) the world will fall apart, B) the characters will be woefully inconsistent, or C) all of the above.

So every, single time you want to make new Star Wars media, you have to retcon the “Dark Side” essentially out of existence.

Thank you!

Thanks!

Materialist answer (inspired by a video called Why The Political Compass is Wrong: Establishing An Accurate Model of Political Ideology, by breadtuber Halim Alrah… and also Jane Elliott’s famous experiment)

Business owner makes money by paying workers to produce widgets at $6 / unit. Owner sells these widgets at $10 / unit, making a $4 profit each sale.

Before long, the workers catch on to the reality of the situation: the owner could be making a lot less and still be able to provide “leadership” (or whatever it is he provides). They decide not to work for less than… $8 per unit. With this price, the owner will still be wealthy (the business makes hundreds of widgets, after all). But now, so will the workers.

So the workers save up money and use it to go on strike.

However: business owner comes up with a better solution to the problem: he divides the workers into brown-eyed workers and blue-eyed workers. He then uses his money to discriminate against the brown-eyed workers. His cronies in government make it legal to deny brown-eyed workers jobs and housing. His cronies in the media write hysterical anecdotal stories about various brown-eyed rapists, thieves, and murderers.

Terrified mobs – stoked into a frenzy by the business owner’s well-funded propaganda – tear down brown-eyed people’s homes and food supplies, leaving them destitute before the strike is done.

The brown-eyed workers now must choose between returning to work for the business owner at $5 / unit… or starving to death.

The blue-eyed workers, meanwhile, have just been tricked into betraying their own team. Some were not tricked, but simply unprepared. These unprepared workers stood by in either shock, uncertainty, or laziness, unable to comprehend how their fellow blue-eyed workers could have become so foolishly self-defeating and cruel.

But now the business owner can put up the illusion of no longer needing the blue-eyed workers. He can run his factory on a skeleton crew of desperate, brown-eyed workers, and say to the blue, “uh oh! Looks like the brown-eyed workers just stole your jobs!”

Much like the brown-eyed workers, the blue-eyed workers have a restricted set of choices: A) admit they were suckers --fooled into attacking their own team – and try to apologize and rebuild their union, B) double down and blame brown-eyed people for undercutting them… but reluctantly return to work, because the strike is broken, or C) just like the brown-eyed workers, they can choose to starve to death.

(A) will be the most difficult. As Mark Twain said: “it’s easier to fool people than convince them they have been fooled.”

The business owner wins, and now society has an eye-color-discrimination problem. Eye color was an arbitrary characteristic. Yet now it decides where someone lives, who they spend time with, and what kinds of opportunities they have access to.

The business owner can rinse and repeat for: skin tone, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc. As the saying goes,

“Divide and conquer.”

You asked why trans people are currently the subject of fear and hysteria? No reason. Not any new reason at least. Trans people are different. Any and every difference between workers is an opportunity for those fatcats rich enough to own “The Daily Mail” and the “The New York Post” to separate us into camps and drain us dry, one camp at a time.

That sounds like the 2003 film, “Good Boy!”