Shame. Cultural norms and taboos are reproduced through shame.
Look down on them. Call them bootlickers. Be clear that you think you're better than them. Make jokes at their expense. Roll your eyes. Leave them out of things.
That's how a culture exercises soft power against manners we think are unacceptable.
Mostly independent media. Throw in a ban on advertising if you are already at it. Probably not realistic, maybe just much harsher rules on obvious lies and political influencing campaigns in media. Much harsher prosecution.
I sound like a broken record but, BAN ADVERTISING. Along with all the pretty well established secondary bad effects of advertising, the most basic direct effect of it is lying to people. If people weren't deluged daily with lies about how they should think of this or that company, they wouldn't be so readily deluded into thinking of a company like a person with a positive effect on their world.
Naaah. If you were a trillionaire, you'd have activated the cheat code to be wealthy for at least 4 generations, and who cares about your great-grandkids really?
Could work tbh. If you show ppl the mirror of reality of them living in dirt conditions while their favourite billionaire buys their dog a 3rd 100 sqm house, they may wake up.
Havent seen alot about musks, gates, etc spending sprees. Bezos had that wedding. Zuckerberg is buying up Hawaii. This needs to be way more prominent.
Platforms like twitter and facebook (and many "news" companies) brainwash their users, mostly by providing multiple different lies. Users pick whichever lie appeals to them the most, and they pretend they have found the truth.
To combat this, we need to emphasize the importance of thinking critically and verifying claims.
State the facts. Correct their misconceptions. Emphasize that billionaires are intentionally killing us all; lazy thinkers might reconsider if there is a possibility their life is at stake. I'm not saying threaten them, but we are all threatened by human greed.
The people you're talking to might not listen, but someone else might. Sometimes it just takes repetition to get through to someone, hearing the same clear message from multiple different sources.
This. Arguing with people online is -- with all due respect -- a complete waste of time if your goal is to change the world.
Ignore the people who have dumb opinions. It isn't as though if you win 500 arguments Elon Musk donates all his money to Socialism.
Go join a tenant's union or a mutual aid society. Go build the alternative world that doesn't transfer all our money upward.
(Also, though, if you do this long enough there will likely be a revolution. But that part comes after you feed and shelter enough people that it begins to become a threat to capital. It's downstream. Either way, don't bother trying to persuade strangers on the internet,)
You have to instill class consciousness in them, which is extremely difficult to do, especially in the usa bc our public education system in many places lies and says that this is a meritocracy when it's not. So people believe that if they just work hard and do what they're told then they'll get rich. And when that obviously doesn't happen, the republican party points towards whatever minority group they've selected for that election cycle and says "it's their fault"
Like I said, actually getting people to understand that they have more in common with the poorest, queerest, immigrant than they do with a white cishet billionaire is really difficult, but the best way to do it is to redirect the conversation from minority groups to the actual problem. For example, if someone complains that immigrants are stealing their jobs then don't start with a denial or disagreeing with them. Say, "you're right. Companies hiring undocumented immigrants for less than or just minimum wage does depress wages for Americans. Companies that do this should be adequately punished and we should streamline our process for getting documents for undocumented immigrants. That way companies can't take advantage of them or depress the wages of americans either." Some people won't listen bc they don't want to learn, but if you keep trying eventually some people will listen and learn
Also try to get them to understand just how much money a trillion or even a billion dollars is
That's the fun part. You don't. It's human nature, at least for neurotypical hominids to submit to confident icons, even when that confidence is unearned and grounded in hubris, not competence. Wealth makes people very confident, even about things they don't actually understand. You're not going to educate them into abandoning millions of years of human instinct. What you can do is make people angry enough at the current crop of billionaires they're ready to put them up against the wall tell them you have a way to keep terrible people from getting that obscenely wealthy again, and then do it... with the knock on effect of making that level of obscene wealth disparity systemically impossible for anyone. That's going to make people angry too though, you're probably going to end up crucified for it, because you know, it's a country of temporarily embarrassed billionaires.
There are times when there are objectively bad opinions. For instance - and very on-topic, showing support for a conglomerate that is actively acting against your best interests.
Stop allowing cuts to education and stop advancing kids who can’t comprehend the material for that grade. The world will always need ditch diggers. Telling a future ditch digger that they’re smart enough to graduate when they can’t read and/or comprehend at their grade level, if at all, is doing that child and society as a whole a disservice. Not only does it set up that child to then become an arrogant adult, but it deprives society of the documentation, or lack thereof, that this person is not, and should not be, considered any sort of authority on anything other than ditch digging.
Understand that some people are actually evil and don’t deserve to live.
I just hate the idea of someone defending a billionare or trillion dollar company for any reason. There is no legitamite reason for them to even exist, since there's no way to obtain THAT MUCH ammount of money without unethical deeds. And anytime you criticize them on ANYTHING, people will still do mental gymnastics to defend these evildoers to act like unpaid PR.
Example: "So what if shipping isn't ACTUALLY free? They HAVE to bake shipping costs into the actual product in order to make a profit!"
Like, congradulations! You are correct! What did that acomplish for you? Other than the fact that you succesfully defended false advertising and ripping people off and terrible customer service in general. Why even care that they make more profit to begin with?!
I just hate the idea of someone defending a billionare or trillion dollar company for any reason.
Then you have a very simplistic worldview. There are many disputes where different large companies are adversarial to each other, so if you have an opinion about them at all, you need to defend one of them.
For example occasionally media companies will try to get laws passed in various countries to make social media platforms pay for linking to journalistic articles. A stupid and nonsensical idea for many reasons, but by calling it that, I may have just "defended" Meta?
Because it is. Right out of the gate he doesn't define what he means.
Are we saying defend in the legal sense when accused of a crime? Because damn right I want that person properly defended against government accusations. Otherwise we're just behaving like a mob, and that goes nowhere anyone wants to be.
that like sounds like trump talk. I don't pay taxes cuz im smartz. Many have talent to some degree or another but no man is worth 1000x the least of men.
I'm just saying your social experience doesn't map onto the rest of society. If rich people are dumb, that means poor people can be smart, and that would mean that we do not live in a fair world. So for this to be a just world, rich people have to be smart and if they're really rich they have to be super geniuses. Keep an eye out for articles about rich people giving their opinion about shit they know nothing about; the undergirding assumption is that we should listen to what they have to say because they must be smart if they're rich.
This is how we got Elon Musk, who, as far as I can tell, is good at some aspects of business, but really masterful at pretending to be smart before extremely guillible audiences.
I know you don't watch new media, but Angela Collier has more than one video complaining about rich people who claim they could have been physicists. "What's stopping you? You have the money. You can take time off and even run your own research lab and hire the best professors in the world to teach you."
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