arbana

🇦🇱

[𝓘𝓒𝓔 ❄︎ @be_like_ice]

I heard someone say.. "In your 30's you start to become who you were as a girl again, but you love her this time"

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

What happened with that viral Red Baron Pizza worker is not a feel-good story, it's a feel-bad story. Everything about it says horrible things about where our society is headed.

Some obnoxious prick films a guy working his fingers to the bone for a "prank" hoping to get social media clicks, and the worker flips out at him because his shitty, abusive job had stretched him a hair's breadth from snapping. The video goes viral because people sympathize with a father shouting at a creepy live-streamer about how his shift was supposed to end an hour ago and he needs to get up at five in the morning to do it all again so his family doesn't get evicted from the home he's struggling to pay for, and then a fundraiser is launched which winds up giving the man half a million dollars.

Sounds like a happy ending, until you look at it. None of the other Red Baron workers are getting fundraisers to help them make ends meet; they're all toiling and suffering along with everyone else in similar socioeconomic positions, just as the man in the video would have been if he hadn't gone viral. Turns out the guy who set up the fundraiser for the Red Baron employee was himself a homeless veteran of the US military, who received his own far less successful fundraiser when this revelation came out. When you zoom out, this is just a story about how incredibly bleak life is for ordinary people in the heart of the US empire.

And yet capitalism proponents have seized on this story as an example of the system working perfectly while portraying it as a victory in their weird culture war theater. Conservative media platforms like The Daily Wire, The New York Post and Barstool Sports have framed the worker as a people's champion standing up to an entitled coastal liberal while working hard for his employer as Judeo-Christian God intended. Red Baron posted on social media that they are part of their employee's "fan club" and that he is their "employee of the month", causing conservative figures like Laura Loomer, Benny Johnson, Kevin Sorbo and Tim Burchett to swoon with approval.

They want you focusing on this one particular instance where it all worked out fine so that you don't think about the exponentially greater number of instances in which it doesn't. Billionaire corporations are exploiting workers around the world for appallingly meager wages, causing a combined amount of suffering too vast for the human mind to comprehend. People resonated with that worker pouring his heart out into that click slut's Meta glasses because so many of us have been there and know what it's like to be stretched to the breaking point just trying to feed your kids.

The capitalist class squeezes the life out of workers, and then they manipulate working people's thoughts at mass scale so they don't understand what's happening to them. They tell them their suffering is because of immigrants, or welfare recipients, or an amorphous cabal of "elites" who always conveniently belong exclusively to the opposite political party. They feed them media convincing them that the system is working fine and that if they can't hack it it's because something is wrong with them. They offer them the occasional "feel-good" viral story about someone who got lucky, like feudal serfs listening to fairy tales imagining that they too might one day marry a prince or discover that they are a member of the royal family who was lost at birth.

They pour all this energy into convincing workers to accept the status quo because they are at all times acutely aware that as soon as the workers stop accepting the status quo, it's over for them. The most under-discussed political reality in the world is that there are a whole lot more people suffering under the status quo than there are people profiting from it, and that the sufferers are fully capable of overturning the status quo by force whenever they decide to.

Our entire society is built around the need to manipulate our attention away from this political reality. All our mainstream culture. All our news media. All our politics. All our education systems. It's all designed to direct our gaze away from the reality that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and that they need us infinitely more than we need them.

They don't want us to look at this reality. They don't want us thinking about it.

But we really, really should.

[JennyPup 🏳️‍⚧️ 🌌 @JennyPupDeath]

In America the president threatens you with healthcare

[Scouter ✞ 🇦🇱🦩 @scouter333]

my people are lions

[chase @_chase_____]

a great tip if you’re packing for a trip is to ignore all the clothes you feel comfortable in and wear on a regular basis and instead bring a long velvet skirt you’ve never worn before that’s slightly too small and doesn’t go with any of your shirts or shoes

[cutiepia @cutiepia8395]

I just want to point out… the amount of money the U.S. has spent on war in the last 2.5 months is roughly the same cost that Bernie Sanders proposed for universal college. So the real question is never ‘can we afford it’… it’s what we choose to prioritize.

[. @Omgemeraldddd]

I’m pretty disappointed that I grew up believing bad people would face consequences for doing terrible things, only to become an adult and realize that bad people literally get away with everything. Sometimes, they even get rewarded for it.

[𝘀𝗮𝗶𝗳 @wyssaif]

how dare i ever be ungrateful

[tara houska ᔖᐳᐌᑴ @zhaabowekwe]

What are we even doing anymore? What do we contribute to the world we all share?

💔

[senpai @Senpaisaysbye]

I genuinely don’t understand how we are supposed to casually process that a glacier literally collapsed in Nepal, erasing 19 bridges and killing over 600 people, because the planet is too hot. And instead of stopping it, billionaires are building more data centres. It is completely psychotic.

[໊ @wandasattorney]

IT SHOULD’VE BEEN YOU

[Resko★ @Bloke_Baz]

I still CANNOT believe humans were gifted a planet full of tress, fruit, water, wildlife and sunlight and then they invented debt, capitalism and war.

[matt bernstein @mattxiv]

every news headline now is like Blueberries Will Kill You. Measles Is Back. Gas Costs Six Dollars. Gwyneth Paltrow Is Selling AI Drone Technology. You Are Being Watched. Three Billion More To Israel. like idk did we do it did we make america great again

[👹 @connnnobi]

Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping. - Hubert Reeves

[arbana @arbana]

Wow im so glad all those cuts were made by doge and now we can’t eat fruits n veggies wow i love America wow #1country #whoneedsproduce

[femiiiiii. @femiiiszn]

i hope the next global trend will be empathy and critical thinking.

[arbana @arbana]

I always knew the social media advertising and boom in tourism would come back to haunt us. I miss the days when people thought I was from Albany, New York because they had never heard of Albania 💔

[Vic Vaiana @vicvaiana]

All this in just 4 years.

Remember when they insisted it was impossible to build green infrastructure quickly enough