ConsciousImpact @ConsciousAmit

People defend capitalism because they confuse it with commerce. They believe “capitalism” is when people start businesses and sell things. If people understood that the thing they call capitalism and love so much is actually just commerce and that it’s not the same thing as capitalism, they would feel very different. This is because a local baker selling bread, a mechanic fixing cars, or an artisan selling wares on a digital storefront is a sign of commerce in a market economy, which is simply a mechanism for exchanging goods and services based on supply and demand. Needless to say, this has existed for thousands of years before capitalism was created. As economic historian Fernand Braudel pointed out, commerce and capitalism are not only distinct; but historically, they have often operated at cross-purposes. According to Braudel, ordinary commerce is competitive and transparent, while capitalism is anti-competitive and deliberately opaque, making it a zone of privilege held by a small elite who bend the rules in their favour. Braudel further argues that commerce, or the market, is horizontal, transparent, and competitive and as old as civilization itself. It involves individuals or small groups trading goods, where barriers to entry are low, no single player dominates, and profit is a reward for fulfilling a specific need. Capitalism, meanwhile, is a specific institutional arrangement that emerged relatively recently in human history, around the 16th to 17th centuries. It is NOT just people “trading stuff”. It is instead the legal and financial system where the means of production are privately owned, and the primary objective is the continuous, infinite accumulation of capital. Because of this accumulation-obssessed nature of capitalism, when it scales up, it seeks to eliminate the free play of commerce to protect its investments. True market competition is risky for massive capital as it drives prices down and threatens profit margins. Braudel contended that capitalism only begins where commerce ends. It is the zone of high finance and state collusion. Because it operates across vast distances such as the 17th-century spice trade, information takes months to travel, which creates a deliberate lack of transparency. Braudel noted that the great capitalists of the early modern era in Madeira and Venice or the Dutch East India Company, never wanted to compete in a fair, transparent market because competition slices profit margins to the bone. Instead, they secured royal charters, exclusive trading rights, and naval protection. At the same time, the state granted them legal monopolies, effectively outlawing competition. Therefore, capitalism naturally trends toward creating monopolies and securing state interventions like bailouts, subsidies, and regulatory capture to shield itself from the very market forces it claims to champion. In fact, the most important takeaway from Braudel’s analysis is that capitalism is NOT the natural evolution or the highest form of the free market, it is its dark shadow. So, when our lizard overlords use “free market” and “capitalism” interchangeably, they’re deliberately hiding this distinction and using the moral legitimacy of the hard-working, transparent business owner to defend the structural privileges of the protected financial elite and its regulatory capture. If ordinary people could comprehend these distinctions, many self-described “capitalists” would realise they are just pro-commerce, and actually anti-capitalist, because it would be clear that defending “capitalism” means defending the right of a small parasite class to bypass the market entirely.

If you're racist or anti-immigrant, then you shouldn't watch the World Cup or any football!! (📍London) @DaneBaptweets

@elonmusk @FoxNews Eberhard and Tarpenning founded Tesla. You didn’t invent eBay or Twitter. Your wealth is from acquisitions, hostile takeovers, and stealing credit. Everything you have was built by workers and you fight to keep from unionizing while you receive govt welfare. You are a parasite.

I honestly hate that we've normalized the idea that all opinions are valid. I think we should get back to telling people that they are ill informed & ignorant

Now that so many of you have finally gotten comfortable with the fact that Israel IS committing a genocide and any criticism of said actions or said nation are in fact permissible, I think you’re ready for the next stage of learning. “Semitic”, which is a historical term used to describe a family of languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, and Aramaic), was adopted incorrectly by a German intellectual in 1911 to create a racial category to describe ONLY Jews, in order to explain the rising European hatred of Jews. This is how the term “antisemitism” was erroneously coined. Expectedly, when racial terms are made-up in this heedless manner, they become rife for continuous manipulation and exploitation. Not only are the origins of the term antisemitism inaccurate and asinine, the current definition of the term has deviated completely from it describing hatred of Jewishness as a faith identity category to it describing hatred of Zionism as a national/political identity category. Zionism not only co-opts the term Semitic by claiming all Semites are Jews (they’re not) and all Zionists are Semites (they’re not), it also co-opts Jewishness by claiming all Jews are Zionists (they’re not). What makes matters worse is that Zionism as an ideology heavily leans on the notion of Jewish supremacy. And this is where it’s going to get a bit “sticky” for you now. OK, so I am glad that most people understand by now that not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews, in fact, there are over 30 million Christian Zionists in America alone. That’s more than double the amount of Jews in the entire world. However, one thing that people are still quite uncomfortable with is the fact that many Zionists are indeed Jews or at least claim to be “culturally” Jewish. And what this means is that it’s highly likely that when you criticize or express hate towards a Zionist you WILL be criticizing and hating a Jewish person. Will you also likely be hating a Christian person? Yes. Does it matter, though? No. Because anti-Christianism isn’t a thing and it especially isn’t a thing that can be weaponized to harm you. Now that we have accepted that Israel is a European settler colonial state and its political ambitions are rooted in Zionism, we need to be able to talk about the Jewish supremacist ideology that fans the flames of its genocide against non-Jewish Palestinians. We need to be able to criticise anyone who supports Israel and Zionism and in doing so endorses and enables this genocide, whether they are Christian, Muslim, or Jewish. Be as unafraid and unapologetic in calling out a Jewish supremacist Israeli as you are in calling out a white supremacist American. Be as principled and steadfast in challenging ridiculous accusations of antisemitism when confronting a Jewish-Zionist as you would be in challenging accusations of anti-Christianism when confronting a Christian-Nazi.

We bailed him out when he was about to go bankrupt and then he screwed us all.

Exposing Argentina! #Messi #fifa

No hospital in Ontario today can afford to cut 87 nursing positions and maintain the same level and quality of care. Dangerous short-sighted underfunding by the Premier Ford.

Tyler Watt 🇨🇦 @tylerwatt

4 days ago

Doug Ford claims to be making record investments in Ontario’s healthcare system. The reality? Hospitals are being forced to work more with less. The QCH announced the layoffs of 87 RN’s, citing financial pressures. This government has gotten their priorities all wrong. We need

30 181 469 49K 8

#7 FOREVER

Ridiculous take that we had the easiest Championship ever don’t know what these fans are genuinely talking about. Beat arguably the greatest 76ers team ever in 7 games by a buzzer Beater. Beat the Bucks while 2-0 down won 4 straight and you’re telling me that’s easy?. And we ended the Warriors dynasty in 6 games and before you say Durant was injured we beat them in the regular season twice with KD playing and we blew them out in there own backyard don’t wanna hear excuses

🟥 Thank you Elizabeth May for this education on the tanker ban, and epic take-down of Conservative leaders and liars. 😌

Kyle Lowry showing love to his 2019-20 Toronto Raptor teammates 🥹🥹🥹 “La Familia!!!” (H/T: @SLAMonline )

Another banger

My brother posts this every year in the family chat on the 4th. Still hilarious.

Listen up. Naomi nails it.

Cristiano Ronaldo sharing a photo of Liberty Village to his near 690 million Instagram followers is everything. Property value on East Liberty 📈 #FIFAWorldCup

Jaylen Brown has gotten more criticism from the media for being intelligent than Miles Bridges did for being an abuser

Mamdani: The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit. How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal.  At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another. Division is the oldest trick in politics, and the cheapest. But time and again-including 250 years ago-those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress. And yet today, too many of our leaders do not believe in a vision of this nation as an asylum for the persecuted-but rather as one that persecutes those seeking asylum. As we mark 250 years, what do we see?  We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions. We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world— one where children go to sleep hungry while the world's first trillionaire hungers for more. We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections. We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans. We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands —those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone —and we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few.