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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: May 7th, 2024

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  • I don’t think local drug stores can afford to be cheaper than a big corporate chain. But the pricing isn’t the point, it’s fostering competition against corporate monopolies.

    Remember that the single purpose of corporations is to make more and more money. By their mandate to their shareholders, all measure of humanity is pushed into the background in favour of growth. The ultimate goal in that pursuit is monopoly: Being the sole supplier for their customers would allow them to dictate sales prices while being the biggest or even sole customer for their suppliers would give them leverage to shift prices in their favour. Their capital backing allows them to cushion out fluctuations in revenue and take losses, so they can afford to underprice and drive out competition, then crank up the enshittification to extort more money from their customers.

    A (comparatively smaller) local store has less leverage to enshittify and exploit. Investing in their higher prices is an investment against that enshittification.







  • In this case it does.

    In this case we’re talking about Elmo displaying what is, in the context of his whole public presentation, clearly intended as a Nazi salute. So no, truthfully stating that other groups have used that salute too isn’t the whole truth because it ignores the context of conversation.

    Yes, only that’s not what I am answering.

    Yeah, but that wasn’t originally the conversation you tacked on to.

    Just that the gesture’s meaning is not definitively only Nazi.

    Sure, but why point that out, when it’s not relevant to the conversation of Elmo being a Neo-Nazi? Maybe this helps to consider the optics of your comment:

    Media: “Controversial” salute
    Comment: Not controversial, just Nazi
    You: Well, there are other meanings for the gesture

    That sounds a whole lot like the apologism going around trying to paint Elmo as misunderstood.

    catch and guess what others think from fundamentally insufficient amount of information.

    That’s communication in general. We use shorthands so we don’t always have to elaborate, but a lot of things pick up different meanings in different contexts.

    And in the specific context - because, again, the initial comment you responded to was specific to this specific display of this specific gesture - Elon has displayed a lot of Neo-Nazi behaviour. That doesn’t mean he has to be a Neo-Nazi (you’re right, see can’t know for sure what he thinks) but that he’s courting their favour (because we can see what he does). That makes it rather reasonable to assume that a known Neo-Nazi-courter producing something looking like an edgy teenager’s imitation of Hitler’s salute is indeed performing a Nazi salute.

    No matter what else the gesture can mean, it’s clear what this instance is intended to signal.



  • “True” doesn’t equal the whole truth.

    Yes, the NSDAP, donning the disguise of a Worker’s Party, adopted a lot of worker movement symbology, and through their prominence has given it awful connotations. Unsurprisingly, the modern ideological descendants have taken up many of those same symbols.

    Yes, other groups use some of those symbols, or some of the other symbols you mentioned. That doesn’t mean the symbols are now innocuous. It just means context matters. A single element (like the torches) in a different context (like an Armenian group) doesn’t make them Nazis. A hooked cross in the context of Hinduism might mean luck instead.

    And in the context of people endorsing Neo-Nazi bullshit, the Nazi salute is very much unmistakable as that.