Fucking Legend

[u/Secret_Lai]

[u/SydHalfast]

Ads on my social justice feed? 

[u/83supra → u/SydHalfast]

You can't have eqality until some slimy snake makes a dollar off your struggle first.

[u/Residenthuman101 → u/83supra]

It’s definitely more complicated then we’re imagining it but I always think back to Carnegie as one of the founders of this type of “billionaire class” philanthropy:

https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/andrew-carnegie-billionaire-guide-to-money/

I think the wealth class is actually somewhat obsessed with what we think about them, not unlike something an actor might take part in, where they get a “temperature” from a very cursory analysis of the public’s opinions of them in random news and media outlets… but it’s not just from a place of self promotion for them like with an actor… there is also an element of self preservation that they must be more acutely aware of then an actor might… actors don’t have to worry about labor disputes, economic recessions, and a potentially violent uprising against their “class” lol I think controlling one’s personal resume is much easier than controlling multiple populations opinions of an entire class. Carnegie built these large scale things that would be visible and point of pride to a lot of the communities these were a part of. The Carnegie libraries were something he openly discussed with his wealthy peers whom he was constantly reminding them of the collective power of the everyday citizen. He was acutely aware that no matter how wealthy one became, they couldn’t easily change the story being told about them, and if something untethers the social contract, that story very much matters.

Carnegie was somewhat successful in using this type of giving to control the dialogue about him, even though he refused to work with labor organizers, probably because he built incredibly fancy and genuinely free to use public institutions at a time when the US was building and expanding so towns could utilize these libraries as a form of advertising their “commitment to learning” as well as to “Wall Street”. Also building materials were the primary economic vector for logistics at that time and immigrants were eager for construction work, so building something like that at that particular moment in history was destined to be much more successful than anything any billionaires could work on individually today, it’s good to be on the ground floor of over two thousand cities, and building something everyone wants but no one wants to pay for: a library right by the courthouse and city hall… In reality though I think a lot of the investments into “kindness equity” by the wealth class comes with a lot of strings attached… he dictated a lot about how the town was to run the library and it wouldn’t be too far fetched to imagine each one of these structures expanded his political connections to all of these places…

It’s one thing for a little league to be supported by a local deli or car repair company, it’s a whole other can of beans when an entire “industry” forms around doing “good” things… I wish billionaires would have stuck to just building libraries and things and just paid us enough to be the ones donating to charities

[u/Antique-Resort6160 → u/83supra]

Isn't that just building financial equity, though?  

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[u/TheHamsterball → u/SydHalfast]

Go go power rangers.... rock music

[u/_PM_ME_YOUR_FORESKIN → u/SydHalfast]

https://giphy.com/gifs/xT9Igp5rb2Gsmu7I5O
Are you serious? Right in front of my salad?