"Elites" is about as useless a word as "woke" or "terrorist"; depending on who you ask, you will get wildly different (and often mutually exclusive) answers on what it means.
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2024
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This meme seems to be logically flawed — essentially, it's an example of a faulty generalization: Let A be a set containing "Elites", "Oligarchs", and "Plutocrats", let B be a set of things that are considered "bad", and let C be a set of things that are considered capitalist; if A is a subset of B (ie all things in A are "bad"), and A is a subset of C (ie all things in A are capitalist) (assuming that those are correct subsumptions), that doesn't imply that C is necessarily a subset of B (ie that things that are capitalist are bad, or, more generally that capitalism is bad) — there could be elements of C not in B. C is a subset of B if and only if all elements of C are in B (ie all things that are capitalist must be bad). So, for the meme's logic to be sound A would have to equal C (ie capitalism only contains elites, oligarchs and plutocrats).
Of course, to avoid forming an argument from fallacy, I would like to clarify that this isn't to argue that the final implied claim of "capitalism is the problem" is wrong, nor the explicit claim that "socialism isn't the problem", or, rather that "socialism is the problem" is wrong, but, instead, simply that the argument used is unsound.
Or it's just purposely oversimplified to be funny.
An issue that I often find is that misinformation is often spread under the guise of innocent humor. If information becomes oversimplified to the point of becoming incorrect, and it's shared as such, I think that some people may not internalize that it's incorrect and will take it at face value. I do think that people have a responsibility to be skeptical of what they read, but I think that the people sharing information also have a responsibility to ensure its accuracy to the best of their ability to, at the very least, reduce the burden on those consuming information, and to reduce the impact of the extremes of people that consume and spread information without any thought given to its accuracy.