So, they want… a company town

So it’s important to remember that companies are not, by and large, moral. They exist for three reasons: to get the money, to get the money, and to get the money. Almost every choice a company makes is in service of that goal.

They are rarely, if ever, going to take moral stands, and it is useless to look at them through the lens of leading a moral crusade. Instead, it is better to look at them as a barometer of public opinion.

Politicians will say anything. Polls can be manipulated. But companies won’t bother with that slight-of-hand nonsense. They want money, and therefore they want people shopping with them as much as possible. And so they will do whatever they think will get them the most business.

50 years ago, can you imagine a business even uttering the term LGBTQ? It would have gotten them crucified. So they didn’t. Now LGBTQ rights are popular with the majority of Americans, so they make it part of their brand.

This thing with Target shows what happens when they get it wrong. And they really, really don’t like being wrong.

Won’t someone think of the billionaires!?

Oh man this is perfect lol

I remember a meme circulating a little while ago that went something like, ‘People who change their opinions because they’re annoyed by liberals are weak-willed; liberals are annoyed by other liberals every single day.’

No, it’s worse than even that. The sycophants surrounding him fall into two camps: the uber-wealthy who want to buy businesses, houses, everything for a song, and see this as a golden opportunity since they have more than enough wealth to ride this out; and the loons who believe the end times are almost upon us and will let Trump do whatever he wants as long as he triggers the Rapture.

Really, there’s three groups, because there’s also a small subset (Zuckerberg is one of them, Elon is another) who fall into both camps. They dream of the day that the world implodes, the governments dissolve into chaos, the environment turns horrible and hostile.

Then they will retreat into their lavish bunkers (Zuckerberg’s is in Hawaii) with their servants and security guards (their loyalty guaranteed by shock collars and their families being held hostage) and wait for everything to subside. And then they will emerge with their loyal army to build their perfect paradise, with them at the head of it, of course.

Seriously, they write long think-pieces and even whole books about this stuff.

Sharia, really? You can’t possibly be that stupid.

Historically, yes. But these days almost all the proselytizing going on these days is from American groups, or groups bankrolled by American religious groups.

But it does appear that he was just doing it for TikTok clout.

Please tell me you mock him roundly for it.

People who want money or resources. You have to remember though, these aren’t the brilliant businessmen they think they are.

Most of these rich people are rich through family and luck, and believe they have magical powers to resurrect businesses and economies with a snap of their fingers.

They think they’ll just put everything back together with them at the top. They really have no idea how they’ll do that, of course.

In this case it’s just the rich punishing a plebeian for daring to challenge them, in the hopes of they make his punishment terrible enough everyone else will be too scared to rise up.

But in answer to you astute observation that the ‘pro-life’ people love the death penalty, the reason is simple: to these people, being ‘bad’ isn’t something you do, it’s something you are.

So to them it’s not a break in internal logic at all. They gave the pure, innocent baby a chance, but they turned out to be a Bad Person, so they must be punished, because that’s what you deserve for being a Bad Person.

This is why they favor punitive jailing and killing criminals instead of trying to reform criminals; criminals are Bad, and so they will always do Bad Things.

It’s also why they do stuff like try to get rid of abortion. If a woman got pregnant from ‘sleeping around’ then she’s a Bad Person and deserves to be punished by carrying the child to term.

Yeah, but 1929 was actually fine for the richest families. Plenty of wealthy people got even richer.

You’ll notice the language in that article describing the success of the businessmen is stock-market-bro speak for ‘gobbled up businesses for pennies on the dollar thanks to the depression, then rode out the storm and made bank’.

Lots of guys on the market these days dreaming of building empires that way.

Translation: hey rich customers, fire sale and reason to lay off your highest-paid employees incoming!

Remember, they and the people who listen to them wanted this.

Yeah, nothing’s ‘plunged’ at all. He’s still in the 45-49% approval rating he’s had since taking office. Hell, any ‘dips’ are statistically insignificant enough to possibly be rounding errors.

What do they think if this latest bit of bullshit?

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’

-Isaac Asimov, 1980

It’s racism. In America the answer is almost always racism.

Basically, with a GoFundMe, or ‘churches taking care of the poor’, or whathaveyou, you can make sure your money goes only to the poor Good Christian white folks, and none of it gets used to help those icky brown folks. Unlike government programs which have to help everyone equally.

And we’re going to have more. Lots more. RFK Jr needs to be tossed in a lake asap

But governments give money to everyone, not just the white ‘deserving Christian poor’. And in the end, that’s what they care about more: making sure the aid only goes to people they approve of. If it’s fewer people all the better, because suffering is godly or something like that.

Most schools do. And Trump just axed the program trying to replace them all.

All conservatives want this law to be reality, and they all want to be in the first group. When you look at it in that light, all their supposedly contradictory actions make sense.

It seems like most of the time the realization they come to is less ‘oh wow maybe this is bad actually’ and more ‘hey, you put me in the wrong group!’