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.
you would have to stop all the MSM from airing news in a certain way, like no tabloid/opinion pieces.
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.
Advocate for stakeholder socialist policies like worker and consumer coöps that would render billionaires impossible.
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’re three bad months away from being homeless.
You will never be three good months away from being a billionaire.
I think I could become a billionaire if I started off as a trillionaire
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?
You under estimate my ability to buy stupid things
Ruthless mockery.
Probably won’t work, but at least you’ll get a laugh out of it.
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.
I like that answer.
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.
only if it’s actually banned and not allowing loopholes for “the government” and “public good”
im. ok with the government advertising there’s an election coming up on date x, or be sure to get your vaccination etc but any political party advertising should be banned , their party policy platform can be on the government website but all commercial advertising should be banned.
This. ☝🏻 We gotta ban advertising.
This. ☝🏻 We gotta ban advertising.
But this is kind of circular logic. We need to convince people to stop defending trillionaires in order to be able to ban advertising or make any meaningful change at all.
It’s so bad that when JC Penny tried to stop deceptive pricing they almost went out of business.
When I worked in retail, the store had different price label flags for different sales, discounts, etc. One of those was “Every Day Low Price.” If something had they price it would never go on sale because they were loss leaders, even big ticket items. The prices on those were below the sale price of competitors.
Far too many times I had a person ask if something already in their cart was on sale, I’d give them the above spiel and even comparison shop for them, and every single time they’d put it back.
It was truly frustrating.
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.
stop comparing them to people with reasonable retirement savings and actually make good points instead of bullshit “evil” and “facism”
You don’t. If you can’t handle someone having different opinions/ideas than you, you’re the fascist.
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.
Education. But you can clearly see the defects of the last 40 years of defunding and deriding education.
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.
“Defending” when accused of what? The question is somewhat meaningless without knowing that.
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?!
Don’t bother answering a purposely daft question.
You mean OP’s?.
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.
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?
Stop letting them participate in society. Shun the fuck out of them.
Education, help your community, try to help people around you getting out of their job thoughts and doing something they actually like, meet new people
