The family destruction came first. You don’t get to that level of cynical populism with a healthy family life and outlook.

We left the leafy jungle and built a concrete one. We moved the competition indoors.

More stressed than yesterday but less stressed than tomorrow!

Traditional conservatives have been severely marginalized in the Republican Party. The floor space has given way to hard right populism. The old conservatives are emblematic of a corrupt elite (within the party) that the MAGA crowd rallied against.

The populists were always there (and always racist), they just happened to be the marginalized ones in the past. Now they’ve taken over.

The hard part about solidarity is that people need to care about their community first. Many don’t, and the feeling is mutual. That sense of alienation, loneliness, isolation is what’s really stopping meaningful progress.

It’s not specific to the US either. Many so-called developed countries around the world have it as bad or worse than the US.

People forget that turnout is a thing. To win an election you don’t have to convert the other party’s voters to your side, you just have to convince them to stay home when your voters are turning out to vote.

Very few people are actually swing voters. Most people are born into a party and vote for that party their whole life. The idea of deciding who to vote for based on the issues is as foreign a concept to them as deciding which religion they like the best and joining it.

Pathogens and Politics: Further Evidence That Parasite Prevalence Predicts Authoritarianism.

Now who says the parasites have to be biological?

A fox on chicken island would kill every single chicken and then starve.

Yeah so you have a great perspective on the farmers in your village but that won’t generalize to all farmers everywhere.

One village.

Protesters are by definition a self-selected group. They’re not representative even of the groups they claim to represent. To meet actual farmers you have to go out and find them in their daily lives, such as at farmer’s markets.

You can also find many of them on YouTube where they make videos about farming and farm life.

I have spoken to loads of farmers. What you’re describing is exactly what I’d expect from someone whose only knowledge of farmers comes from leftist online spaces.

That’s a regulatory environment which gives rise to these companies, not a specific feature of capitalism. Government interference, crony capitalism, regulatory capture; whatever you want to call it. You see similar sorts of corruption in other systems: feudalism, mercantilism, communism.

It’s the problem of elites. No one has ever found a solution to it.

Yes I read all that on Wikipedia. What’s lacking is an explanation of how you’re equating the crimes of one company with capitalism as a whole, in order to justify taking away the right of farmers to personally own their farms and equipment and sell their produce at the side of the road.

Which is not described or explained, it’s merely alluded to with a vague mention of everyone’s favourite bogeyman, Nestlé.

Or perhaps those areas have other problems not mentioned here?

When I go down to the farmer’s market, none of the produce there is being sold by Nestlé, yet I live in a capitalist country. How is that possible?

I guess you’d prefer to continue speaking in vague generalities. Carry on!

Farmers’ produce goes for a pittance because of supply and demand clashing with growing seasons. For example, when peaches are in season the market gets flooded with peaches because all the peach farmers are harvesting and shipping peaches at the same time. Thus peaches are dirt cheap during peach season. Farmers would get a lot more for their peaches if they could spread them evenly throughout the year but nature doesn’t work that way.

As for the “layer above” farmers (distribution and retail), that all depends on what country you’re in and how agriculture is managed. So you’ll need to give a specific example if you want to discuss further. Under capitalism (at least in my country), farmers are free to sell their produce directly to consumers at farmer’s markets or even beside the road outside their farm.