How can people say false things like this with a straight face?
Thanks to industrialisation, automation and mass production, the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom, let alone poor people back then: abundant cheap food that poor people can now be fat instead of starve to death, cars, planes, MRI machines, helicopter ambulances, vaccines, personal heating and air conditioning, OZEMPIC, etc
Kings back then would eat hard bread, shit down a vertical shaft that emitted the scent through the whole castle, and their sleeping chambers had ice on the walls in winter and lice in the clothes and bet sheets, plus they had parasites in their gut and any small disease could kill you.
Meanwhile the cool homeless guy outside my building has 3 hot meals a day and a daily shower in the homeless shelter nearby, warm clean sleeping bag for winter, shades for summer, a bicycle for moving around town, a smartphone which he uses to watch youtube all day in his sleeping bag, plus access to medical care that kings of kings never had. All this with no job, and no care in the world.
You can thank people dying in Chinese and African mines to extract the resources to build your planes and MRI machines.
You can thank the people working tirelessly until their hands are crippled in bengladesh to make the cheap clothes that make it seem to your western eyes that a poor person here can live a life of luxury. Those people are constantly invisibilised even as tragedies such as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rana_Plaza_collapse
hit them and kills a thousand under your total westoid apathy.
You can thank the Chinese slave labor making iPhones and Macbooks at foxconn for your luxurious electronics being cheap enough for a western wallet. They have suicide prevention nets so that their precious slave labor doesn't die from jumping from their buildings. How amazing.
>the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom
Indeed, the wealth that kings couldn't dream of hundreds of years ago, because kings back then didn't have the power a billionaire can wield today to pollute, enslave and ruin millions of lives at a scale that makes things like the Napoleon wars look like a footnote to history.
>All this with no job, and no care in the world.
This can only happen because the extreme wealth inequality of the world has divided entire countries into classes of people. You are blind to the reality of the humans you are exploiting.
Firstly, industrialization is what led to the abolishment of slavery in the west, because owning machines was making you more money than slaves, and it was the west who fought the seas to stop slavery internationally, to the disappointment of slave owners in Africa who were enslaving their own people before the western slave trade began. So you can stop blaming the west for slavery now. The age of English and Dutch slave trade boats is long gone, we don't have MRI machines because of slaves.
>Those people are constantly invisibilised even as tragedies such as
100% nobody cares because they have their own government who is accountable to them. What should other countries do about it when it's their own government killing them. I also don't expect other countries to care about the deaths and issues in my country since our politicians are to blame, not foreigners. People care about their immediate family members, they don't care about random people on the other side of the planet dying in some domestic accident. It's just how it is.
>You can thank the Chinese slave labor making iPhones and Macbooks at foxconn for your luxurious electronics being cheap enough for a western wallet.
Just a couple of days ago there was a post here on the front page of shipping a used Macbook from Australia to a student in Ghana. It's precisely because western investments in technology and Chinese mines and sweatshop factories that people in countries like Ghana can have cheap laptops and cheap smartphones to access the internet and gain higher education for well paying IT jobs on the international market. So thank you and you're welcome.
>This can only happen because the extreme wealth inequality of the world has divided entire countries into classes of people.
Humans were always divided into classes of people ever since human species existed, they were never equal and they never will be equal, this is a human trait, not something billionaires created, they were just the best today at rising to the top within this human inequality system that has always existed and will always exist.
Need I remind you communism also existed based on the ideals of equalizing everyone, and so everyone was equally poor except of course the ruling elites, while also having no MRI machines.
Woah the air is thick with BS.
Just because someone is rich doesn't mean they're better smarter hard working or anything more than anyone else. They've just had particular circumstances in their lives. Most societies are not truly meritocratic where the most competent and skilled people would succeed. This is not the determining factor. Education is a great example of this when in many countries not everyone has equal access to education. People do not have equal access to resources or networks or support structures to become entrepreneurs. To start a business or to study or to become whatever they could be.
Eventually People may not be equal or have equal skills and talents and that's fine but everyone should have an equal opportunity.
1. None of that is necessary to having planes and MRI machines, so what you're replying to is basically correct,
or
2. We should rouse ourselves from apathy in order to give up planes and MRI machines, and even out the poverty, which is eternal.
Have you ever been without a job and/or homeless to say shit like this?
Also, how nice of you to ignore my entire argument on how the poor today are NOT as poor as they were hundreds of years ago, and instead sidetrack the conversation one offtopic tangent for a cheap jab in the name of scoring some emotional virtue signaling brownie points.
Thanks to colonialism, also in more modern form called globalism.
> Kings back then would eat hard bread, shit down a vertical shaft that emitted the scent through the whole castle, and their sleeping chambers had ice on the walls in winter and lice in the clothes and bet sheets, plus they had parasites in their gut and any small disease could kill you.
Wealth has no intrinsic value, only relative one. You are only wealthy relatively to other members of the society. Doesn't matter if pharaohs had less comfortable lives than me. What matters is that a gap between pharaoh and a worker working on pyramids was way smaller than between Jeff Bezos and person working at the Amazon distribution center.
Also, most sweet fruits of progress that its prophets like to enumerate are not direct consequences of technological changes, but they came only after political struggle that has arisen exactly because the direct consequences were very dire for most people. If people pushing today for AI could decide on these things, they would be very happy to take away these hot meals from homeless people and let them starve to death.
You don't have to participate in globalism, you can be a hermit state that doesn't trade with the evil imperial capitalists, like Cuba and North Korea. Everyone wants to live there because the QoL is so good.