acts of bravery that go underappreciated: – taking medication/seeing a professional – bringing up something that makes you anxious and talking through it – admitting you made a mistake – sending a message first – apologizing – standing up for yourself
Something my middlest brother pointed out yesterday:
The wealthiest people on Earth do literally nothing with their wealth. They do an awful lot with their power, but not the hoarded wealth itself. Any spending or reinvestment is minuscule in proportion to the sheer amount that exists just to sit there and accrue. The wealth grows far faster than it can be spent, so any argument that spending is itself an efficient form of redistribution falls apart.
Under capitalism, capital races to become inert wealth. It is not a self-perpetuating dynamic system, it’s a system degrading toward a kind of heat death.
Of course. If they spent their money. They wouldn’t have money anymore. The rich suck money out of circulation in the economy and it stagnates indefinitely with them. Any amount they spend, no matter how ridiculous to us will never be a significant fraction because that’s what makes them rich and that’s how they stay rich.
The more rich people there are, and the richer they are, the weaker any economy becomes. There’s no way around it.
Their class warfare propaganda castes themselves as economic saints who “create jobs” as if they’re paying all their wealth out to their employees. If that were the case they’d be losing money the more they expand their business. But that’s not how business works so. Duh. That is a lie. They expand their business only to expand their profits and they always make far more than they pau back, so, literally the more jobs they create the more they suck out of the economy.
They also cast the poor as a burden, in order to pit those with a little to lose (middle/working class) against those with nearly nothing to lose (working poor), keep them squabbling with each other over the scraps of their salaries and tax funded benefits and nobody thinks about the tiny minority that has EVERYTHING and leaves everyone else squabbling over scraps. But the truth is, the poor can’t afford to save money, sequestering it from the economy. They spend every penny they make and still go hungry. But all that cash flow strengthens the economy. Every penny of every benefit they collect doesn’t stay with them, it gets paid by the government to private interests, like grocery stores and land lords. Benefits for the poor don’t go to the poor they go through the poor right back to the rich anyway. The poor are the opposite of a burden, no matter how much benefits they receive, everything they get they pay out immediately.
The rich are the ones taking more and more away and never pay back in as much as they take out. The rich are by definition the only real burden on the taxpayer and the economy. If they are allowed to keep getting richer without limit, eventually our economy, society, and political system will collapse under the weight of the money they amass.
The whole idea of market-based economies is that money is in circulation. People work, get paid, use this money to buy things, which pays other people so they can make/buy more things, that are bought/made, ad infinitum.
But when you take a bunch of the profit out of the calculation it just collapses.
It’s pretty rare for money to actually be out of circulation.
When you keep money in a bank, they don’t just have a giant vault full of money. They are usually lending that money out. Which means other people are actually using it.
And, like, look at Elon Musk. Dude’s super rich. He’s been doing Tesla, and SpaceX, and other things, and he’s actually investing his wealth and, yes, creating jobs. But even if he were just leaving the money in a bank somewhere (and thus, not making as much money as he is this way), the money would still be getting used.
as a general rule. if what we’re calling ‘cultural appropriation’ sounds like nazi ideology (i.e. ‘white people should only do white people things and black people should only do black people things’) with progressive language, we are performing a very very poor application of what ‘cultural appropriation’ means. this is troublingly popular in the blogosphere right now and i think we all need to be more critical of what it is we may be saying or implying, even unintentionally.
There is nothing wrong with everyone enjoying each other’s cultures so long as those cultures have been shared.
Eating Chinese food, watching Bollywood movies, going to see Cambodian dancers, or learning to speak Korean so you can watch every K drama in existence is totally fine. The invitation to participate in those things came from within those cultures. The Mexican family that owns the place where I get fajitas wants me to eat fajitas. Their whole business model kind of depends on it, actually.
If you see something from another culture you think you might want to participate in, but you don’t know if that would be disrespectful or appropriative, you can just…ask. Like. A Jewish friend explained what a mezuzah was to me, recently. (It’s the little scroll-thing near their front doors that they touch when they come into their house. It basically means “this is a Jewish household.”)
“Oh, cool,” I said. “Can I touch it? Or is it only for Jewish people?”
“You can touch it or you can not touch it,” she said. “I don’t care.”
“Cool, I’m gonna touch it, then.”
“Cool.”
It’s not hard.
You want to twerk, twerk. I’ve never heard a black person say they didn’t think anybody else should be allowed to twerk. Just that they want us to acknowledge that they invented that shit, not Miley fucking Cyrus.
this is a good post.
Thank you, I was trying to sort this out in my head but you explained it very well.
This. When I was a kid, there would be roadside tourist traps that sold “Indian” jewelry and clothes that were Made in Taiwan (good LORD shows how old I am) and even my family knew to not buy that crap. But when vendors from the area Choctaws would have booths at the folklife festivals selling authentic wares, they WANTED us to. It was a sharing of their culture and the money went back to native families. The same when my dad visited Oklahoma; he brought back art made and sold by Cherokee artists.
I would add:
Cultural exchange is a two-way street. For years, Western musicians have been dipping into Asian, African every kind of music. This is GREAT. However, what isn’t so great is when Asian musicians like me get told we should only be making bhangra or asked why we make “white” music.
Do you see? The road only flows one way. White musicians can go anywhere, take anything. Non-white musicians ~ nope. That isn’t exchange, that is colonialism.
What I want is freedom for everyone!
That last part is really important.
I am absolutely in favor of other people taking things from my cultural background, too! Don’t tell people they can’t or shouldn’t take things from the dominant culture or a culture that you think is too dominant. Taking those things and repurposing them strengthens every culture.
Y’all know that individual health behaviors – choices around nutrition, exercise, smoking, etc. – only account for about 25% of a person’s health status? The determinants of health are largely social: income and education level, the safety of one’s physical environment (e.g. working conditions, clean water), and degree of social support. Trauma is far worse for health than fast food.
It’s tempting to subscribe to a just world theory, where good things happen to good people (or people who make good decisions), and problems befall problem people, but that just isn’t the world we live in.
Most sick people have spent their lives fighting against oppressive circumstances. They don’t invite illness and hardship with their bad decisions, they are miracles of survival in a sociopolitical environment that’s hostile to their very existence.
just moving along like everyone else 