Iron Man and Batman can only do what they do because they have the time and access to resources to do it. Guardian from Alpha Flight, for example would be something like “Working Class Ironman.” Common engineer who found out the mining suit he was building was going to be sold off to the military so he stole the prototype and became a superhero. He’s kind of an “Iron Man’s brain, Captain America’s heart” kind of character, so if you wanted the non-rich Iron Man, it exists, it’s just not Tony Stark. Tony needs to be rich or he’s not Tony Stark.

Same with Batman. The Shadow is a former soldier who uses stealth, martial arts and magic tricks to fight crime. But he’s not Bruce Wayne because being a billionaire playboy is what makes Batman possible.

Why recharacterize heroes with totally new backstories when the not-rich version is already a different superhero.

Volkswagon was similar for a while until the monied class realized someone, somewhere was making money without them and bought their way into a controlling position. Still have significant, though no longer controlling union ownership.

And now you’re completely characterizing my statements and lying to make yourself feel better. Good day.

I mean if your go to is to personally attack anyone who disagrees with you I don’t know why anyone would bother to have a serious discussion with you, but for the cheap seats I’ll try.

Yes, Criminal Psychopaths can, in certain circumstances be good people, other than the fact that they brutally kill some people. No mass murderer has ever been arrested that their neighbours weren’t standing there saying “but he was such a nice guy!” That doesn’t mean I don’t think they should be dealt with harshly, but the reality is, there are people who are good husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, and friends who also do absolutely monstrous things when no one else is looking. While we’re at it, there’s no such thing as someone who has never harmed anyone. We’ve all done things that hurt people, and no, just apologizing doesn’t make it all go away. Some harms are more serious than others but no one is blameless. There are absolutely people who tend more toward good, and some that tend more toward bad, but I’ve also watched “good” people rationalize and try to justify some absolutely wild levels of cruelty under the wrong circumstances.

Look, I get it, you’ve been through some shit. I’ve been there and the idea that some people are good and some people are bad and as long as you find the good people you’ll be safe is really comforting. Unfortunately it’s not true. There’s no such thing as someone who is always cartoonishly evil, and there is no one who is perfectly safe, not even you.

There are no objectively good and bad people. Never have been, never will be. Every one of us is a grab bag of contradictions. Objectively good people are not rare, they’re fictional. If you seriously look under the surface, we’re all both monsters and angels on some level. Some of us just have better self-control and/or fewer opportunities to be actively transgressive.

As others have pointed out, there’s no “black-and-white” (if you’ll pardon the irony) way of categorizing people. Bad or good people are fictional. Even the best of us have ugly parts to how we behave, and otherwise terrible people can show surprising compassion. Our values can conflict and in the moment we chose to do something wildly out of character, or indulge in impulses we didn’t even realize we had.

In the real world there are no absolute heroes or villains. A man who gave his boots to a homeless man one moment, could beat another to death a few months later. Human beings are wildly inconsistent.

That’s not entirely true. Greens are much more active in Britain for example than Canada despite using almost precisely the same electoral system.

A significant part of why I think they’re so weak in Canada is they’re not as coherent in their message. Their platform and base is actually much more conservative than a lot of European Green parties, which turns off the more progressive left environmentalists, and leaves them struggling for more conservationist moderates, who are kind of a dying breed.

“Value” is a term so ambiguous, it’s actually worse than not saying anything.

Well that’s twice as much as you’ve suggested. All organizing starts by bringing people together. Meeting like minded individuals and building out a core network. It takes time to build communication and supply lines for more aggressive action. So far the only thing you’ve got to offer is excuses and cute nicknames like idiot orange. That milling around carrying signs is where you take stock of assets you can leverage and people willing to act. When you’re done wallowing in self pity, you can come step up and find the people that have been building the infrastructure we’re going to need to do something meaningful. Or just sit it out and let someone else do it for you, while pretending doing nothing gives you the moral high ground.

In terms of actual theoretical frameworks? Libertarianism is highly individualistic, anarchism is highly collectivist. Extreme libertariansim can be described as “Every man for himself” and anarchism as open ended, reciprocal (as opposed to transactional) community.

Wow that’s a spectacular leap of logic. Protesting the Epstein class is the same thing as making friends with them? You should change your handle to Pizza Wheel, all edge, no point. The world is ending so do nothing, sit down, and cry about it on TikTok. Because that’s somehow going to change things. What a brilliant strategy. You’re a real hero for doing SFA and complaining when people try. Movements run on logistics, logistics takes organized infrastructure, but you hate people so bad even suggesting it sets you off.

Go on then, show us how it’s done. Run out half-cocked, pretending your John f-ing Wick, and be the lone wolf to save the world. Let’s see how that works out for you. This isn’t CoD lobby, this is the real world. One person is powerless, useless, and means nothing by themselves. Our power is in numbers. ORGANIZED numbers, not wild senseless riots. Are they going to try to poison the well with agent provocateurs? Absolutely. We adapt, and we come back because surrender is not an option. Unlike you, who apparently thinks surrender is the only option. What’s wrong with my soul? What’s wrong with yours.

So, most billionaires just sit on unrealized assets and take out loans against them that are untaxable. This way they avoid capital gains taxes from spending down their assets, as long as they never sell them, they never have to pay taxes and can sit on them until they die. Then it’s their kid’s problem. If you put a tax on those loans that exceeds capital gains tax, now they’re losing money by living off loans, and they’re actually better off selling some shares and stock options to pay for their Bugatti and super yacht.

The foreign investment profits tax means if they skip town and try collecting income from the companies they own from a beach in the Cayman islands, (or a brothel in Thailand) they are still paying tax on it before that money leaves the local market. That’s going to cool off the market for foreign investment but it’s also going to mean that even if they skip town, they can’t dodge the taxes on income from domestic businesses.

That’s going to take a lot of math and market analysis to work out the specifics of. I’m just one rando on the internet. This was more of a high level framework to start from. With a team of wonks and a bit of time you could pin down precise numbers.

A bunch of armchair defeatist rhetoric is definitely going to move the needle though? Networks built in the George Floyd era were critical for organizing anti-ice activity, but clearly that’s just coincidence.

If you don’t want to go, don’t go, but spare us the moral pretention and self-soothing nihilism.

Counting on politicians to fix this, regardless of party is an exercise in futility. We need to be building community organizations whether it’s Trump in power, Kamala, or Bernie. The Dems can’t fix this, the best you can expect from them is the bleeding slows down. We won’t get something better until we build it ourselves, with or without liberal permission or approval.

It’s not that that’s a stupid question, it’s just so broad as to be largely unanswerable. Every mineral and constituent nutrient is going to come in a variety of forms depending on the type of food and the specific nutrient. For magnesium, sure, some may be in oxide form, but also magnesiums salts, permanganates, constituent parts of various enzyme complexes, receptor binding sites… the number of permutations is nearly indescribable.

This. The infrastructure to take large scale labor action has been systemically dismantled over the past 50 years. We need to focus on networking and building up institutional infrastructure for large scale collective action. It’s not a fast process, and you can’t coordinate the logistics for this kind of collective action in a year or two.

The civil rights movement took decades to achive anything. The union labour movement took generations to build enough legitimacy to have an impact. Organizing on that scale is not something you can do in weeks or months.

Some are trying, but it’s a slow process going from toothless protests to a serious movement. It took decades for the civil rights movement to reach a point where people took it seriously. It took generations for union labour to gain legitimacy. We let the tools of community organizing and collective action rust away in complacency. It’s going to take time to reforge them.

The specifics are going to need refinement, yes. The broad principles should hold though. One tax that forces them to spend down accumulated wealth, one to punish trying to offshore profits to tax havens.

As an elder millenial I might have some insight. You know how when we were kids people used to get all up in their feelings when you weren’t smiling. That’s this. “Gen Z stare”, is just “Resting Bitch Face” or “You look prettier when you smile darlin’” repackaged and rebranded. They’re mad that the young people in general and women in particular aren’t running around with goofy forced smiles on their faces to make them feel special.