- cross-posted to:
- onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- cross-posted to:
- onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone
You must log in or # to comment.
I dont belong on this planet. That’s why I have to rent space until I mercifully pass away. Giving birth is child abuse and the most selfish act possible.
Some people really enjoy someone else being worse off than them.
Removed by mod
Gruesome how we have social darwinists even here in comments
Deserving to live and surviving are not the same. In the natural condition if you don’t gather or hunt, you have no food. You die. You do not deserve anything.
Even in society you are not entitled to others working for you. However, in a civilised society we should provide for those incapable to provide for themself due to ethics.
Hey, you! The zebra on the right! Get in my belly, I deserve to live!
I think it would incredibly more desirable for society to have a firm social safety net (housing, food, healthcare). We have the technology and means to do so without breaking a sweat.
If we try it and society stagnates, we can always tweak it to incentivize certain types of work. Myself, I believe society would see vast improvements when people aren’t surviving and living in shambles. I believe many of our current issues would be quickly solved once we are broadly able to slow down and think for a moment.
Deserving or not deserving doesn’t really factor into the equation. We need to create and build a world worth living in. I want to live in a world where people are more free, healthy, and safe - where work is directly benefiting our communities instead of people being forced to slave in hostile work environments to barely make it.
In general I agree. People should be able to make informed life choices without pressure. However, I don’t think universal basic income is the solution (see below). In Germany we have no public university fees and you can get Bafög; which is a far from ideal conditional income enough to cover housing and food while you study. You have to pay a part back once you are done, but far from all (at most 50%; often less than that). I wouldn’t mind a study UBI.
I am for social security and social services that allow you to make an informed choice of what you want to do. Beyond that I am for “you have to work”. But I am looking at “work” from an European perspective with all the protection laws in place and not an American perspective.
The main problem with UBI (Universal Basic Income) is that while tests showed benefits (highly depending on countries), financing UBI is difficult. So far no larger country has completely adapted UBI at least partly due to that reason. Also, no study was long enough to see the “people are less incentivised to work” issue.
Thanks for your response and engagement. I appreciated hearing your perspective as a German/European in contrast to my perspective as an American.
Our society (with US at the forefront) is built on contradictions. On one hand, capitalism says you don’t deserve anything, you have to earn it. On the other hand, consumerism says you deserve every new gadget, luxury, treat.
I believe both are false: everyone deserves a reasonable standard of living (UBI?), nobody inherently deserves more than that but it should be possible to earn it. And we should acknowledge that earning something is not a matter of moral superiority, but a combination of some effort and some luck.
Capitalism is sold by liberalism as a grand system where everyone is on equal footing as buyers and sellers of goods and services, including labor. Consumerism is pushed by capitalists to increase the purchase of commodities beyond what would naturally happen (no need for a new phone every year), a sign of capitalism’s inefficiencies.
Earning more through labor isn’t wrong, but the problem is that the system is built off of the theft of value created by workers, and parasitic capitalists sitting at the top siphoning off vast amounts of material wealth. Every sale of a commodity continues this vast siphon from the working classes to the capitalist class. UBI doesn’t fix this, what would fix it is moving onto socialism, where public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy, the working classes are in control, and production and distribution are aimed at satisfying needs, rather than private profits.
Thank you. I have been saying this for years (more than a decade now).
Feminism fought for the independence of women from abusive husbands/partners, by making them earn their own money, so they can be free. I would not say that the majority of the population feels particularly free today, because the economic situation strangles them. There is a new dependency created in stead of the old one: The dependency from the employer. Especially with at-will employment, a manager or higher-up can fire you at any moment, which can cause homelessness and despair. These are not good things that we want to have.
The logical consequence of fighting for freedom and equality is to fight for economic equality: People should be able to eat and sleep in peace, without having to worry about their circumstances tomorrow. “Equality” does not mean that everybody has the same amount, but that everybody has the chances they need to succeed in life.
We need a universal basic income, or any equivalent of it such as handouts in various forms.
Or, hear me out, we create a socialist government that make food, water and housing human rights and that works towards a communist world where everyone gets what they need and give what they can.
Lol, it’ll totally work this time around, pinkie promise.
Socialism has worked incredibly well in uplifting the lives of the working classes. In countries like Russia and China, life expectancies doubled. The incredible improvements in living conditions, democratization, and orienting society towards satisfying the needs of the many instead of profits for the few resulted in the greatest eradications of poverty in history. Socialism has worked, continues to work, and will increasingly work as time goes on, until it is eventually replaced by communism.
Fascists and capitalists, slavers and landlords and other leaches were indeed killed and oppressed by the communists. It’s better than the daily genocide and violence of capitalism and imperialism.
It really says a lot about Wikipedia that it has an article for that but not an equivalent for capitalism caused disasters. Like say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster.
Or the toxic wastes that lead to the creation of the epa in America
Yep, how you frame and present information has a dramatic impact on how it is interpreted, and in liberal, western-dominated spheres communism is demonized while the excesses of capitalism are minimized.
People are too happy to overlook systematic issues with capitalism just because they think they’ll be one of the lucky ones on top getting to make the inhumane decisions, all in the name of getting another dollar
This is gradually fading as capitalism crumbles.
USAID’s cancelation is calling…
Somebody only read the article title… Give the actual text a look to see it boldly claims the connection to political system is not strongly linked.
Thats more a government thing than a communist thing.
You coukd skip the government part and use other organizational systems in a constant experiment to find the full communism faster…
Earning a living implies that you’re not using passive income to mooch off people. It’s contrasted to land lords and nobility who were simply entitled to money.
mooch is a great word.
Well, l don’t earn a living since I don’t feel pressurised. But I ought to do something worthwhile just to feel that I am alive !!
The main thing is to remember what is worthwhile is not necessarily something that is imposed by mass culture, tv or the Internet.
You don’t deserve to be alive though, and it applies to everyone, even animals, if you don’t do the bare minimum you’ll die hot, cold, thirsty or hungry.
Yet I am to believe that Elon Musk deserves to be alive by a factor of several million times more than the people who grow my food?
No, that is not what the commenter above said, in any way.
Elon doesn’t work, though, so he doesn’t deserve to be alive. It’s not about money, it’s about effort to contribute to society. My favorite saying is “community is uncomfortable,” because it portrays the work that it takes to be there for your fellow person. Even someone with a disability or other issue that prevents them from doing traditional work is already working plenty just to get through the day. Elon is the exact opposite of that.
Good thing most of us don’t live like animals or think like you: we live in a society.
Even in the US, at least some effort is made to not let the disabled who can’t care for themselves or financially support themselves die in the street. https://legalclarity.org/what-does-ward-of-the-state-mean-for-adults/
The appointment of a state or public guardian is a measure of last resort, as courts prefer to appoint a family member whenever possible. State wardship occurs when the incapacitated adult has no spouse, willing family members, or a previously designated agent to take on the responsibility.
Fair enough to support disabled people or those who definitely can’t work by themselves.
But if we’ve all got oars on a boat and some people just choose not to paddle then they can get off the boat. I bet there’s a lot more rich people and trust fund babies not paddling than there are lazy poor people though.
That’s a really nice society you got there /s
ITT: guys who probably consider themselves too smart for religion thinking in terms dictated by the church.
“Deserving” and "undeserving* are made up concepts disconnected from any concrete reality, just shards of Christianity preserved in the amber of American civic religion and exported throughout the capitalist-dominated world. If you talk about who “deserves” this or that, you might as well be talking about who’s holy and who’s a sinner. The truth is, we are just animals who banded together tens of thousands of years ago to help each other survive. Many anthropologists say that society began when we started taking care of those who could no longer contribute as much physically: the old, the sick, the injured. But hey, if you want to be less socially evolved than a bunch of cave-dwelling hunter gatherers, that’s your choice. Just don’t expect the rest of humanity to entertain your rotten ideas about useless eaters, and don’t act surprised when you find yourself put out on the ice.
No one deserves to be alive, except perhaps by virtue of being alive in that everyone deserves the converse: not to have life taken from them.
You had millions of possible brothers and sisters who didn’t make it. You were just the lucky one.
And, of course, earn a living means make enough to support yourself, and others if you choose. Nothing to do with what is inferred and also not something everyone can do.
Evolution makes approving noises
Because society is social darwinism, got it.
While I agree with the sentiment I also think that it’s best for society if everyone contributes while realizing that some are able to contribute more than others. Essentially no freeloaders.
Well since it’s literaly us vs the planet (since we seem to be unable to regulate our society’s consumption of finite resources), the question is : does the planet exist for us to consume it ?
The answer is no, but we’ll still consume it.
Do we deserve to live ? Well outside of society, there is no reason we’re deserving it more than any living being. And sometimes I clearly wonder, when some individuals contribution is a big negative legacy for the next ones, and to the planet.
Tbh I do not mean we (humans) do not deserve to live, but I clearly wouldn’t want it taken for granted, cause it is not.
That varies quite a bit by country. Capitalist systems have no problems with destroying the world, but socialist countries are better able to plan production and distribution. You can see this in action in the PRC right now, and its major shift towards renewables and electrification at an astounding scale.
(Oh wow. No one replied with this quote yet…)
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” ― Buckminster Fuller
deleted by creator
