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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • I grew up around wealth. Wealthy people who have been poor sorta get it, but can lose it depending on who they hang out with. Wealthy people who grew up wealthy and went on to be wealthy adults don’t understand what lower / lower middle class life is like, what it does to you to live your life with intermittent low level financial stress and peaks of high financial stress. They can have empathy for it, they can see you’re struggling, but the behavior associated with financial instability looks to them like a series of bad decisions and choices they could never see themselves making. Their peer groups overwhelmingly come from the same economic class they do, so they have no social model for what a person making those choices is going through.

    Most especially, the human brain uses peer feedback to calibrate it’s own sense of right and wrong and what’s real and what’s not. Wealthy people who spend no time with less fortunate people actually can’t process those people’s lives as something immediate or directly present. They can only think about it abstractly. They can’t connect it to their own inner life. They can be moved by the plight of people in need, but they genuinely don’t get it.

    Also, they’re just as short sighted, shallow, selfish and superstitious as any other demographic, and they have inflated senses of their own intellect and capabilities (due to only getting specific kinds of peer feedback), so they tend to be offended (rather than self reflective) when presented with the idea that they don’t understand something.

    If we select leaders (of either party) from the upper class (I.E. those who can afford to run for office) we will ALWAYS get willfully out of touch psychology from our leaders. And when we select someone else (A Mamdani, an AOC), it will always look to the wealthy like this person is unhinged (because their actions and rhetoric don’t fit into the rich person’s calibrated sense of reality).








  • tl;dr: screw reddit. Good bye forever (again).

    I had to go back to reddit about a year ago to promote local mutual aid organizations and protest groups. I had turned my “since 2008” account into nothing but over the top abuse aimed at u/spez and vulture capitalism during the RiF debacle. I made a new account and engaged a little bit. I commented now and then, because you have to have minimal amounts of activity to post on some of the local subreddits.

    Two days ago, I got flagged by automoderator for mocking a conservative on r/politics. I apparently had like 8 hours to tell the mods I was sorry, but I had no idea I’d been flagged, because I hardly go on reddit so I didn’t know. They gave me a three month ban and when I messaged them to be like “why was I banned?” because it didn’t make sense to me… I hadn’t done anything that objectionable, a mod very condescendingly told me “You had 8 hours to respond to the complaint, but didn’t avail yourself of the opportunity. You may protest the ban in 3 months.” I seriously messaged them back with “enjoy your enshittification train to corporate town.”