Did you say thank you?
Well, that’d be one fo the first times Vance has done something that’s worth a shit, even if it were inadvertent.
Even bad people can be useful! Even if only as a bad example.
The walking ballot-poison.
Chef’s kiss!
ETTD has spread to his VP. You love to see it.
If an STD were human. It would be J.D. Vance.
*based on odds on fucking polymarket. This is not news
Thanks for saving me a click
What, she couldn’t have just had OpenAI write the article for her?
If you see the line “Why it matters”, it’s very probably written by AI
Since then, betting markets show Orbán’s stock has fallen marginally, though there is no suggestion that his declining fortunes have been caused by Vance’s intervention.
So betting markets not polls, which would be pricing in the diminishing uncertainty as the day draws near, and it wasn’t like a sudden drop either.
There might not be a story here. Orban was losing, and he’s still losing.
So someone will bet big on him on Friday and they’ll do everything possible that he wins.
If you’re in Fidesz you already have a major financial stake in him winning. And maybe a stay-out-of-jail stake.
Remember Trumps son is a part of pollymarkets board
Hopefully he doesn’t lose like Nicolas Maduro lost the last election.
Okay now THAT’S fuckin funny.
After killing the Pope, and destroying Orban’s political career, Vance is the Political Grim Reaper.
He should spend more time with Trump.
I do rather hate that so many news orgs seem to be using polymarket et al as a drop-in replacement for actual polling, because polymarket is loosely affiliated, if at all, with reality. It’s a fucking betting platform. There’s nothing scientific or statistical about it that aligns with demographic realities.
Newsweek has always been a questionable source since its purchase by the notorious IBT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources#Newsweek_(2013-present)
Not to mention that a quality poll would just be among qualified likely voters in the election in question, where as polymarket is just gambling addicts anywhere on the planet.
But at the same time Polymarket seems a bit like a self fulfilling prophecy - because Polymarket says something, it by itself increases the odds of that event happening; and in the cases where it isn’t this way, look for the large amount of bets 2 hours before the event in questing, a.k.a the “GOP spike”.
On the other hand, it’s well designed to surface inside information. Exactly the thing that lots of people complain about, but it’s a good thing if you’d like to use the prediction market to make predictions like this.
Europe needs to elect socialist leaders to respond to this moment, or fall into the grips of fascism.
How does capitalism inevitably lead to fascism?
Basically, the issue with capitalism is that the more wealth you have, the easier it is for you to make more money. And since money can be used to buy goods, services and influence, there is always a way to use money to gain more political and social power. With that political and social power, you can push society and the legal system in the direction you want to go. So you can use your wealth to gain power, and then you can use your power to change laws and society so that you can make even more wealth and power. It’s a positive feedback loop.
Obviously, though, if the billionaires and ruling class are accumulating more and more of our society’s wealth, that inevitably means that there’s less for everyone else to go around - therefore, working class people feel poorer and poorer. Meanwhile, the economy is going absolutely great for rich people, so inflation continues to go up - everything gets more expensive, but wages don’t increase. The wealthy just keep more and more of the wealth for themselves. To accumulate more and more wealth, they change the laws so that they can avoid paying taxes, so public services collapse. Politicians are lobbied to ensure that public funds are diverted away from where it is most needed - housing, healthcare, transportation, infrastructure - and instead into industries where their class interests most benefit from it, such as weapons manufacturing and extractive industries such as fossil fuels and mining.
The working class are bound to notice that their lives are getting shittier and shittier, and if that situation is left unchecked, the working class would realize that the ruling class are fucking them over, rise up, and overthrow their rulers. Obviously, the ruling class need to do something about this, but there’s no solution that the ruling class can offer. They’re causing all of the problems, to fix them they’d have to give up some of their wealth and power - and that’s not something they’re going to do. So they need to find someone else to blame the problems we have in society on. Unfortunately, though, no matter who they blame the problems on, and no matter what they do to “fix” it, the issue will continue to persist, because the material conditions underlying the issues are, very intentionally, never addressed.
So, the conundrum returns: The ruling class said that minority A caused all of the problems, minority A is persecuted and oppressed, but society doesn’t actually get any better. Either the problem wasn’t minority A, or minority A just hasn’t been oppressed enough yet. So the ruling class can either escalate the oppression, or they can shift the focus to another minority group. The division continues to escalate in terms of how vitriolic and extreme it is, and it also continues to divide the working class into smaller and smaller groups.
To get the working class to buy into this hateful message, they need to take advantage of our worst instincts, and one of those instincts is the in-group bias. The majority are manipulated into being suspicious, then intolerant, then hateful, then violent, then genocidal, towards whatever the targeted minority of the day is. Anything that can be used to divide the working class - sexuality, nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender identity, age, all of these will be used as wedges to keep the working class split apart and not working together, because they know that if the working class actually unite against them, they are completely and truly fucked.
That’s exactly how fascism manifests. It’s because it’s possible for people to accumulate power through wealth. This is why capitalism must be abolished. If we do not abolish capitalism, fascism will always return. It’s just a matter of time.
But can't capitalism can be reformed?
Capitalism cannot be reformed, any attempts to reform, democratize or socialize capitalism may yield short term improvements to quality of life of the working class, but if capitalism is not abolished, it will always reassert itself, and capitalism inevitably leads towards fascism. The New Deal prevented the US from sliding into fascism in the 20th century, so that’s ultimately a good thing, but it did not go far enough, and that’s why we have the resurgence of fascism in the 21st century America.
Any ideology or system that justifies and fosters self-interest over solidarity will lead to a concentration of power. If someone, whether by a stroke of luck or by intentional manipulation, can end up having and holding more power than others, cumulative probability will make it a question of time until such a someone succeeds in using that power to amass more.
I generally agree, that’s why I am an anarchist - If you haven’t heard much about anarchism before, you probably have some misconceptions about it, so I encourage you to watch the Q&Anarchy video series by Thought Slime or have a look through an Anarchist FAQ, because it’s almost definitely nothing like what you think. I personally believe that it’s the most coherent philosophy which adequately explains and addresses all of the problems which plague our society, and which holds the most promise for a path out of the inevitable cycle of the continuous rise and fall of fascism that capitalism makes inevitable.
That’s what I was getting at.
I try to avoid dropping the term (precisely because of the misconceptions involved) and personally am not a fan of the heavy-handed “here’s a block of information for you to absorb” approach that has long deterred me from looking into it. I just can’t easily work up the energy, attention span and time to commit to longer reading or video series.
Hence, my attempt is to “sow” the rough ideas in a format I personally found more digestible. We all know the “didn’t read the article” phenomenon, so I try to sum it up in a shorter comment rather than expecting people to click through to some treatise where the table of contents for Section A already spans three mobile screens, the third paragraph of the introduction to it (not even A.1 yet) metions five sections (A-E), dubs them just the “first part” and strikes a very much academic tone.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good source to read up on the theory, but not what I’d consider an approachable FAQ for curious laypeople.
What is your point? Most people want to advance, ideally their whole live long, instead of standing still or even regressing.
I’m doubling down on the point made by the previous comment: Capitalism as a system enables that aggregation of power.
I’m not sure what you mean by “advance”. If you mean self-improvement or improving living conditions, that doesn’t have to come with a detriment to others. We can lift each other up. Life isn’t a zero-sum game, if technological advancement is focused on increasing our productivity in order to generate overall prosperity and leisure to pursue fulfilment rather than maximising unsustainable profit and pushing most of us to pursue subsistence while a few become ever more obscenely powerful.
If you mean advancement in a hierarchy of power, then that’s exactly the issue I’m criticising: self-interest instead of solidarity, sabotaging quality of life by pushing us into a rat race of having to do better than others.
Lol
I was really wondering about that. At the time, I was saying to myself, “This is not the endorsement you think it is, Orban.”, lol.
Since then, betting markets show Orbán’s stock has fallen marginally, though there is no suggestion that his declining fortunes have been caused by Vance’s intervention.
Betting markets. Grain of salt taken.
