#abolish billionaires | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

smarmy-yet-satisfying · 10 months

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In case you were wondering how screwed we all are:

The fossil fuel industry has successfully completed their infiltration and takeover of the COP climate conference. The president of COP 28 is going to be an Oil CEO.

Billions of people are going to die but the rich don’t care so long as they can maintain the status quo and continue lining their pockets.

And I’m supposed to feel bad that a couple of them got themselves squished on a voluntary trip to the bottom of the ocean???

#eradicate billionaires #exterminate billionaires #abolish billionaires #abolish capitalism #climate change #capitalism #eat the rich #climate crisis #joe biden #wealth inequality #late stage capitalism #us politics #climate emergency #vote #oceangate submersible #ocean gate #titan submersible #titanic

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ladyvaderpixetc · 9 months

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Jon Stewart, hitting the nail on the head once again.

#gacked from Jessica Chastain's tweet #jon stewart #on the ridiculous lies regarding #trickle down economics #and billionaires hoarding wealth to play with #abolish billionaires #us politics #but also kind of #uk politics #hell it's #world politics #billionaires and privatisation are a global threat

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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months

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Naomi Alderman’s ‘The Future’

Naomi Alderman burst onto the scene in 2016 with The Power, an explosive and brilliant feminist apocalyptic parable. Now, seven years later, she's back with a chunky, propulsive second novel about a very different sort of apocalypse: The Future:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Future/Naomi-Alderman/9781668025680

The Power was a thriller about a mysterious force that gives women the power to administer violent electric shocks – even lethal ones – from the palms of their hands. As this power races around the world, the status quo is abruptly shattered. Abusers get nasty surprises. The Saudi government topples. Parents of teenaged boys demand sex-segregated classes to protect their sons from vicious girls:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/10/10/naomi-aldermans-the-power-in-which-fierce-power-of-women-is-awoken/

In The Future, we get a very different kind of apocalypse: the imagined apocalypse of the prepper. At the core of prepperism is a fantasy: that the world will experience a cataclysm that requires the special skills and supplies of the prepper themselves. Water chemists who turn prepper fantasize about attacks on the water-supply – not because there's any special reason to expect one, but because if terrorists attack the water supply, then water chemists become civilization-rescuing heroes:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/22/preppers-are-larpers/#preppers-unprepared

(And of course, if the world ends in such a way that marauding bandits rove the wasteland, eating their former neighbors, then macho, AR-15-obsessed musketfuckers get to reinvent themselves as warlords who defend the sheeple from "bad guys.")

This is what makes billionaire prepper fantasies just so weird – for most of us, it's hard to imagine how the skills of a billionaire are the one thing we'll need to see us through a crisis. But for billionaires themselves, the necessity of billionaires in rebooting civilization is so self-evident as to be unquestionable.

What's more, billionaires are convinced – more than any of us – that the world is about to end. As Douglas @Rushkoff puts it, these guys want to earn enough money to outrun the consequences of how they're making all that money. This is #TheMindset, the idea that your own position has jeopardized civilization itself, but that also, you must survive the cataclysm, because only you can survive it.

Rushkoff chronicles the real-world fantasies of luxury bunkers patrolled by mercenaries locked into explosive discipline collars in his book Survival of the Richest:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

But billionaires don't just suck at running civilization, they also suck at making up stories about its collapse. One thing that's striking about Rushkoff's ethnography of rich people preparing to outlive the end of the human race is how banal their eschatological fantasies are.

It's not that there aren't any exciting stories to tell about billionaire survival fantasies. The granddaddy of these is, of course, Edgar Allan Poe's 1842 "#MasqueOfTheRedDeath":

https://www.poemuseum.org/the-masque-of-the-red-death

I published an updated version with the same title in 2019 in my novella collection #Radicalized:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#masque

In The Future, we get a cracking, multi-point-of-view adventure novel about billionaires prepping for the end of the world. Three billionaires, the lords of thinly veiled analogs to Facebook, Google and Amazon, each getting ready in their own way. Stumbling into their midst comes Lai Zhen, a prepper influencer vlogger with millions of followers.

When Zhen becomes romantically entangled with Martha Einkorn, the top aide and chief-of-prepping for one of these billionaires, she finds herself in possession of an AI chatbot that is devoted to protecting a very small number of people from incipient danger. This chatbot determines that Zhen is being stalked by an assassin at a mall in Singapore, and guides her to safety.

The chatbot is a closely held secret among the tech billionaire cabal. It is designed to monitor world events and predict when The Event is imminent, be it disease, war, or other cataclysmic disaster. With the chatbot's predictive powers and its superhuman guidance, the billionaires, their families, and their closest confidantes will be able to slip away before the shit hits the fan, fly by different private jets to one or another luxury bunker, and wait out the apocalypse. Once the fires raging without have died down to embers, the chatbot's billionaire charges will emerge to assume their places as wise and all-powerful leaders of the next human civilization.

As you might imagine, not everyone who finds out about this plan – including various members of the billionaires' families who are fully aware of these rich, powerful people's fallibility – is enthusiastic about it. As we build toward a looming crisis, we cycle between these family members, Zhen and her hacker buddies, and members of an online prepper community where Einkorn is a kind of provocateuse and eminence grise.

Alderman skillfully maneuvers all these power players and blocs into position before detonating the crisis that sets off the book's second act, where we get into some damned fine Masque of the Red Death territory, but clad in Tony Stark mecha survival suits and against a backdrop of total disaster.

I won't give away any spoilers here, except to say that there are lots of twists (that won't surprise readers of The Power, which had its own excellent surprises). But without delving too deeply into the fake-outs, crosses, and turns that Alderman lays, I will say that this is a fantastic and incredibly satisfying comeuppance novel that gets very deep into the ideology of wishing the world would end, and dreaming that when it does, you will finally matter.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/07/preppers-of-the-red-death/#the-event

#pluralistic #naomi alderman #the future #books #science fiction #apocalypse #billionaires #abolish billionaires #big tech #maneki neko #preppers #gift guide

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nando161mando · 5 months

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anarchywoofwoof · 9 months

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these 17 individuals have combined to increase their wealth by a collective $512.81 billion this year so far.

a year where the planet burns and humans starve to death and drown as they seek safe harbor.

to put this in perspective, they have accumulated more wealth just over half way through the year than than the united states has spent in 2023 on:

energy

veterans benefits and services

transportation

education, training, employment, and social services

natural resources and environment

general science, space and technology

COMBINED

they are watching the world die and making a profit by doing nothing

#fuck capitalism #eat the rich #abolish billionaires #anarchy #anarchism #politics #anticapitalist #anticapitalism #billionaires should not exist #collapse

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neighborhoodjewishaunt · 9 months

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still the mood

#abolish the police #abolish prisons #abolish landlords #abolish billionaires #anti lawn

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phroexx · 10 months

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#twitter #oceangate #billionaires #abolish billionaires

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originalleftist · 21 days

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There should not be billionaires.

And, it has little or nothing to do with the moral character of an individual billionaire. It doesn't matter if you like a particular billionaire, or if they give a lot to charity. It's wonderful if they do, truly. Nor is it necessary to vilify individual billionaires to prove the point, though many of them certainly are vile. But it doesn't change the fact that the concept itself is fundamentally unjust.

We live in a world with finite resources. Very finite, until and unless we establish a large-scale presence off of Earth. If some people have billions, it means that others have a lot less. It also means that those people with billions have vastly access, more options, more power than others.

"But they earned it"- NO THEY DIDN'T. Even if they really did somehow work their way up to being a billionaire from nothing, you cannot say anything that will convince me that some people are literally MILLIONS OF TIMES more valuable or more meritorious than others. And anyone who's NOT a billionaire making that argument honestly needs to stop and ask themselves why they have so little self-respect, as to think that those billionaires are worth so much more, are so much more deserving, than they are. Do you REALLY believe that there are people out there who are MILLIONS OF TIMES more worthy, more talented, more deserving than you?

Much the same is true for any form of hereditary monarchy/aristocracy. Sure, King Charles is an asshole and easy to mock, but even the best monarch or noble is still a fundamental injustice, because it's not about the character of an individual person. It's about the idea that certain people are inherently more important, more worthwhile based on heredity/"blood", which is a lie, fundamentally undemocratic, and fundamentally unjust.

And this is the absolutely central difference between the Left and the Right.

#Tax The Rich #Abolish Billionaires #Abolish The Monarchy #Leftist

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tim-ee-sis · 1 year

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I’m proud of this! The only time I’ll be in the top 1%.

Spanish and French both got better and I started learning Russian.

#duolingo #me #abolish billionaires

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catboymafia · 5 months

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#abolish billionaires #tax the rich #targets #anti billionaire #big oil

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thatheathen · 7 months

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Elon Musk is a Nazi.

#fuck elon musk #elon musk #elon musk is a little bitch #elon musk is a Nazi #eat the rich #abolish capitalism #abolish billionaires #billionaires should not exist

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smarmy-yet-satisfying · 5 months

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So having a fossil fuel executive as the president of the UN Climate Summit is going about as well as expected

Fossil fuel companies and the politicians they employ are murderers. And they should be treated as such.

Abolish billionaires. Ban private jets & mega yachts. Invest in renewable energy and stop listening to politicians and corporations over scientists.

#cop28 #climate change #capitalism #eat the rich #climate crisis #wealth inequality #late stage capitalism #us politics #climate emergency #climate activism #joe biden #climate science #fossil fuels #climate justice #climate news #climate solutions #tax the rich #abolish billionaires

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adabee3d · 10 months

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hii welcome to my silly little tumblr!! here are some things about me: 🌸my name is Ada! 🌸27 long tired years old 🌸artist makin' video games 🌸from the UK but hate it here honestly 🌸trans woman 🌸she/her 🌸lesbian 🌸annoying about music (will not shut up) 🌸if you're a cis man i'm probably going to ignore you!! will likely never post again c: Maybe I will use this blog to post personal artwork (which I have zero energy to make since I started working in the industry), maybe it will be for reblogging memes, probably going to try and keep horny to a minimum but still 18+ thanks for stopping by and have a gorgeous day!!

#trans #trans woman #artist #3d artist #gamedev #lesbian #new on tumblr #sick of twitter #abolish billionaires #not really new on tumblr I had this shit like 10 years ago

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bedtimesnack1008 · 1 year

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