this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2025
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...and oligarchy, and fascism, and income inequality, and decreasing life expectancy, and increasing infant mortality, and more wars, and huge amounts of debt, and job loss, and...
Short version: unchecked capitalism.
But I was told that capitalism checks itself using something called “market forces”.
Turns out "market forces" was just the heavy metal poisoning talking, they were just hallucinating magical economics.
Lead in gasoline and household products really fucked with some generations, hard.
Hey now, those “market forces” are actually the work of the wonderful ‘Invisible Hand’! Which is of course the work of God and is definitely not being manipulated by all those billionaires behind the curtain over there…
Imagine a war against an enemy with known lead poisoning.
That would probably be an easy win
They poisoned themselves with shit from pet stores and farm supplies. They sent death threats to the guy who told them not to inject bleach.
Individually, they may be easy to beat, but as a group they are worse than a zombie apocalypse
Yeah. Those problems totally didn't exist before capitalism.
Not all at once, no. Fascism didn't even exist until the 1920s.
Fascism is a modern iteration of an old problem. Not even the worst version of it. Plenty of theocracies and empires in history promoted similar strong group/national identity paired with subjugation of individuals to an authoritarian state.
And fascism is not even compatible with capitalism as it requires state control over industry. It would be more compatible with socialism except that it's not nationalizing industry for the benefit of the working class explicitly, just the benefit of the nation/state.
Capitalism is also a modern interpretation of an old problem. The idea of material wealth determining worth and power. That's largely how "might makes right" works with a more economic flavor.
If you think you can't have state control in capitalism you haven't been paying attention. China is capitalist country with tons of government controls. They can throw a "communist" label on it, but that have little to no actual communist/socialist ideology.
When the state fully controls your property, it's not private property and thus not capitalistism. It's not socialism either, because they still give deference to the original "private" owner.
China is a perfect example of how a fascist country would operate, honestly. It's frankly annoying that people don't routinely call it a fascist state and instead call it communist.
Besides that it's smooth sailing.
... and microplastics, and resource scarcity, and MRSA, and infrastructure collapse, and social media addiction, and ...
"We didn't start the fire..." But you guys threw a bunch of petroleum and coal and tar sands on it
Change resource scarcity to resource hoarding and we have a deal
We're so close to flying cars
The decreasing life expectancy is largely related to obesity though. There are a lot of obese people who find reasons to blame other than their own self determination. If corporations have made it easy to eat yourself to death, people shouldn't just let them get away with it by eating themselves to an early death.
I’m glad you brought up personal responsibility, however if you’re buying something from the grocery store, unless it’s raw ingredients, it has shit in it. Even then, in the US the only way to completely avoid nasty shit in food is to produce it yourself or purchase from a local farmers market. Unfortunately many people don’t have the resources to do that. But to your credit, we do seem to be developing some sort of allergy to personal responsibility, especially in regards to personal health and fitness.
If people willingly choose to shorten their life, I don't consider it a problem.
Now, lying and manipulating people into choosing it, similar to what the cigarette industry did, is obviously a problem.
But at this point, everyone knows cigarettes and processed foods are unhealthy. People just don't care.
People dont have the energy to care. They're spending all of it trying to keep their families fed, clothed, and under a roof.
I'm so fucking tired of people pushing personal responsibility for systematic problems. People are kept intentionally under educated and do not have the resources to learn. No not everyone "knows" ultra processed foods are bad. Most people can't even properly defined ultra processed foods and default to calling them processed foods which covers basically everything you find in a store besides produce.