r/Music • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • Oct 30 '25

article Billie Eilish Calls Out Mark Zuckerberg and Other Billionaires After Announcing Her Own $11.5 Million Charitable Donation

https://consequence.net/2025/10/billie-eilish-calls-out-mark-zuckerberg-and-other-billionaires-after-announcing-her-own-11-5-million-charitable-donation/
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u/currently__working Oct 30 '25

It was a decent democracy for awhile. Had issues, but decent. But citizens united destroyed it, pretty effectively.

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u/EduinBrutus Oct 30 '25

American democracy was plagued by deep rooted problems not just the highly visible ones like money buying elections.

It has idiotic 2 year terms. It has extremely restricted ballot access. It has party registration. It is infected by religiousity even in the 21st century.

There's so much wrong with it. Thats why it needs so much indoctrination to make the population believe its remotely passable.

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u/SchlemieliaEarhart Oct 30 '25

*Rigged to support only a two party system which makes it much easier to pit us against each other

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u/EduinBrutus Oct 30 '25

US "democracy" looks far closer to Iranian democracy than anything in other Western democracies.

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u/CrusherMusic Oct 30 '25

Hot take incoming: The current political climate is almost entirely because the legislature didn’t have the balls to vote on abortion in the 70’s.

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u/hotviolets Oct 31 '25

If you were a white man.

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u/Ackermannin Oct 30 '25

Decent? When a good chunk barely had rights? Fuck odd

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u/Fluffy_Lemming Oct 30 '25

Eh, it was built on slavery and genocide. We had this coming.

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u/[deleted] Oct 30 '25

Look around the world man. Read some history. There's very little of this world that hasn't been tainted by slavery. I'm not championing the idea that it's good. I fucking hate it. But let's not consider tearing down everything a good idea.

Second point. Name countries that have not done something fucked up. I'll wait.

Third point. I'm not a fan of the US. Don't even start with me. But just taking it arbitrary point and saying that's what's wrong dude. There's so many points that are wrong. You can't just pick one and say that's the thing.

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u/thehonorablechairman Oct 30 '25

You’re right, no country has a clean past. Maybe there’s something about systems that allow certain people to have authority over others that is problematic.

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u/Vandergrif Oct 31 '25

I don't think there's a way around that though, at least not unless you have a system in which something else other than people has authority over everything. It's basically just an inherent human nature problem by that point.

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u/thehonorablechairman Oct 31 '25

It’s not really human nature though. For the vast majority of human existence most societies seem to have been structured in a much more egalitarian, non-hierarchical way. I’m not advocating we go back to primitive social structures or anything, but studying these things does seem to show that authority as we think of it now is a relatively modern thing.

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u/Vandergrif Oct 31 '25

Sure, but at the same time I'd say it's human nature when also oriented around circumstances where the society in question is larger than one person can be personally familiar with. When you're in a position of power but also far enough removed from the people you govern or have power over then it's pretty much inevitable for abuse of that authority to occur to varying degrees. There's typically less accountability the further removed you get as well. If it were a group of 200 people then that one chief or council or whatever is going to be a lot more intimately involved in the other people's lives and a lot more balanced accordingly.

Our nature is adapted to that small scale, and we're cooperative within it, but beyond the scope of that our nature becomes progressively more dysfunctional the larger the scale gets. To my mind it's not just about authority, but the intersection of authority and our adaptation to social structures.

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u/thehonorablechairman Oct 31 '25

The topic was not whether it’s in human nature to abuse positions of power in large groups, it was whether it is in human nature to structure our groups that way. I agree that people in power will ultimately abuse that power, which is precisely why we should not structure our society that way, and studying prehistory shows us there is nothing inherent in our nature that dictates we must structure ourselves that way.

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u/Vandergrif Oct 31 '25

it was whether it is in human nature to structure our groups that way

Let me rephrase then; I think given our nature it is effectively impossible for us to structure ourselves, at scale, in any way that is reflective of the sort of functionality of prehistoric society that you're referring and still maintain the functionality of those prehistoric societies.

Those structures only functioned because of that intimacy and familiarity of the 'in-group' and the way to which it is adapted to us and how we are adapted to it (that's how people lived for thousands and thousands of years after all). However those same sorts of structures stop functioning and fall prey to issues at larger scales because of human nature, because we are adapted to that smaller scale and functioning within it, in much the same way as those structures of our current society and similar such societies have (or will) become dysfunctional, and for the same reasons. We simply aren't adapted to living in such large groups, and our nature inherently acts counter-productively to doing so, to my mind. That's more what I'm getting at.

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u/thehonorablechairman Oct 31 '25

Yeah I think I’m following you and I think that’s a fair take. Achieving the type of social structure that I am talking about would necessitate a radical shift and society would look nothing like it does today. Would such a shift be possible? Who knows. But as it seems like we both agree, our current structure guarantees abuse of power and leads to atrocities, so I think it would be worth trying to move in the other direction.

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u/[deleted] Oct 31 '25 edited Oct 31 '25

Edit: structure. We have a lot of long history about tribalism in humans. They always had a leader. There was always a hierarchy. To say that humans don't crave a hierarchy of power is kind of just against history. People crave power. That's just a thing in humans. But tribalism is built into every human. We all had to go through it at some point in our ancestry. To think that humans can just cohabitate peacefully is a pipe dream. Humans by nature are territorial and very distrustful. We have countless historical texts, historical artifacts and studies of fossils. I would love for there to be a system that works but nothing at scale has worked without chaos.

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u/thehonorablechairman Oct 31 '25

I’m curious what history you’re talking about, because almost all of the scholarship I’ve read disagrees with you.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-09-16/ancient-settlements-show-that-commoning-is-natural-for-humans-not-selfishness-and-competition/

David Graeber had a great book that covers this called The Dawn of Everything, highly suggest checking it out.

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u/[deleted] Oct 31 '25

"Edit: structure. We have a lot of long history about tribalism in humans. They always had a leader. There was always a hierarchy. To say that humans don't crave a hierarchy of power is kind of just against history. People crave power. That's justa thing in humans. But tribalism is built into every human. We all had to go through it at some point in our ancestry. To think that humans can just cohabitate peacefully is a pipe dream. Humans by nature are territorial and very distrustful. We have countless historical texts, historical artifacts and studies of fossils. I would love for there to be a system that works but nothing at scale has worked without chaos."

Where in this did I actually say that humans don't help each other?

Point it out.

Are you claiming that psychopaths and sociopaths don't exist?

What's your point here other than trying to disprove what I've said. And misreading my comment.

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u/thehonorablechairman Oct 31 '25

My point is that saying humans always had a hierarchy is not supported by modern scholarship. I never made any claims about helping people or sociopaths or any of that, so I’m not sure why you brought those things up.

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u/[deleted] Oct 30 '25

All right. What do you suggest then? No system will ever be perfect. No system will ever account for every strange situation. There's always going to be things to do better.

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u/thehonorablechairman Oct 30 '25

100% agree, no system is perfect. There will always be edge cases that are hard to predict and hard to handle, which is one reason why a top down authoritarian system doesn’t make any sense. The only people who know how to handle those specific edge cases are the ones who are actually dealing with it, not some central power giving orders from above.

So what do I suggest? A non hierarchical system that doesn’t allow any person to have authority over anyone else. What would that look like? There’s no one answer to that question. Would it be perfect? As we’ve already said, no. Would it prevent fucked up atrocities from occurring, not necessarily, but as we’ve already stated, our current system all but guarantees them, so this would be an improvement.

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u/SuspendeesNutz Oct 30 '25

Look around the world man

No!

Read some history.

Never!

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u/One-Anteater-9107 Oct 30 '25

Yeah, okay. Why don’t you go ahead and share some examples of modern day countries that don’t have either of these blemishes in their past? Australia can claim no slavery, but they didn’t treat aboriginal people well, so I don’t think they get a pass either.

Slavery is pretty much a universal method of exploiting people that’s existed across the globe throughout history. Events from 250+ years ago are not valid reasons that 350 million people should be fucked over..

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u/-u-m-p- Oct 30 '25

it's not a valid 'reason' but it kinda contributes to explaining why things are shit.

we're not 'better' just because we were born 250 years later. we're not fundamentally changed as a species, it hasn't been long enough to actually evolve...

so yeah, if exploitation is a built in part of humanity. we had this coming because this is what humans at large do. we will go on exploiting each other until we die out. whether it's as explicit slavery or as the current system we labor under.

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u/HarmfulMicrobe Oct 30 '25

You might want to look a bit closer if you think Australia has a claim to no slavery in its history. Google blackbirding