Seleni

And if the landlord hadn’t been such a shithead, it wouldn’t have.

That’s because they have a bad case of tribalism. The capitalist is white, so in the same tribe. So they can’t be bad… right?

I think Sir Terry Pratchett put it best:

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.

Speaking as someone who’s in a blue-collar workspace, and who has family in Trades, they do still think those people are ‘taking our jobs’; they just say it quieter because they know they’ll get in trouble with HR if they say it too loudly.

WTF AI has literally talked people into killing themselves, multiple times

Yeah, that’s the kind of strange I can get behind lol

UnLunDun giraffes

That’s basically one of the two tenants of conservatism, really; that the Natural Order of society is a pyramid, and everyone needs to ‘stay in their place’ to keep the pyramid stable, or society will collapse.

The second tenant of course is Wilholt’s Law.

What those two combine into is an almost religious obsession with a tiered in-group out-group layering system, with each level lower down the pyramid Out of the higher groups but In the same-tier or lower ones.

Until you get to the bottom, which are the ones everyone gets to grind under their heels because they’re in the Lowest Tier and thus the Wicked Useless Dregs of Society only good for slave labor and kissing the feet of their ‘betters’.

In fact I’m about three-quarters convinced it is their actual religion, as I’ve noticed that if their so-called ‘religious teachings’ or ‘beliefs’ countermand either the Order Pyramid or their/other people’s place in it, they will abandon or twist the teachings of their religion rather than abandon the pyramid.

Because they are allowed to punch down on children and brown people. Often, as long as a person has someone to punch down on, they can tell themselves they have it good. For some reason.

But also they’re taught from birth that Order and Structure is Very Important; everyone has their specific place and level in society that they need to stay in, or all society will collapse into anarchy and no matter how bad they have it now, things will be infinitely worse.

So they support that structure with absolute fervor, telling themselves that they’re Saving Society, themselves, and even all those other ungrateful women from the horrors of socioeconomic collapse.

I believe so yes

Hope you feel better soon! And I hope the heat isn’t bothering Sandy too much.

But paying attention to other people’s houses is how they avoid looking at their own.

Have you heard of the concept of company towns?