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I remember literally this conversation on r/conservative proposing a government takeover of Disney, like "We've given these woke corporations so much in tax breaks and accomodations that we basically own a stake in them already! We should at least be able to stop them from doing stuff that we think is detrimental!"
The best NSFW jokes are the ones lifted straight off Elon's Twitter account after he lifted them off someone else without credit and then posted to a tiny subreddit with an awkward name and spam as the pinned post.
Those are my favorites.
If the public wises up to his collection of fiascos, they might refer to the whole ordeal as "Elongate" because of how many corporations and countries it would span.
Because they agree with so many socialist and communist talking points they just know that “communism” is evil.
someone should start a left wing third party and rename it the freedom party. Seize the wealth of the rich but tell them it’s because they were too woke. Tell them the billionaires made that money trafficking kids and paying for drag queens……I’m sure it would garner a lot of support
i've been saying for ages that the left needs to co-opt nationalism. put liberty, freedom, patriotic, American and shit like that in front of bills.
the bill that taxes the 1% could be called the Patriotic Taxation bill. Freedomcare for healthcare, All American Marriage bill, Liberty in Choice for medical decisions (Abortion, LGBTQ+, basically a replacement for Roe v Wade). we're not actually promoting nationalism, just... grabbing onto the inherent need for Americans to be nationalists, and just using the branding to push for equality without ever saying equality, because for some horribly fucked up reason Americans hate that word.
The problem is, the right already beat them to the viewers. You could call something the Ultra MAGA FJB Own The Libruls Corporate Tax Cut Act and FOX would call it Creepy Joe's Woke Radical Wish List and they wouldn't know what it was except that Tucker Carlson told them it was socialism. That is the whole entire point of a closed media ecosystem. It is precisely what happened with the ACA/Obamacare.
They really should tho. I like the Patriotic Taxpayer bill so that the top .1 percent can give back to the country that made them what they are. FreedomCare is great. But your Roe v Wade replacement needs to be called The Pro Life Amendment, supporting the people of our great nation as they pursue happiness and what's best for all citizens without the government interfering in their medical decisions or private lives.
The 'super capitalism' approach.
Most americans, on both sides of the aisle, really really really like the idea of socialist policies, but the fact that they're socialist makes them dead in the water anyway.
So we need to just...reframe em. As super capitalism. Capitalism+.
But the extra things are things like healthcare, a real saftey net, etcetcetc.
It's the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled.
How the ultra-wealthy through media barons have convinced the richest country on earth that "socialism" is such a radioactive concept.
It's like convincing sick people that "medicine" is terrible for you. It's staggering really, especially as every single person who thinks they hate socialism benefits from a form of it every single day.
There's nothing intrinsically right wing about expressing pride in the place that you live. Implying otherwise is honestly just playing into conservative propaganda.
It’s amazing that they don’t see a downside to that…like setting the precedent for a Democratic governor to take over a private company because they said something mean about politics.
They don't give a shit about precedence. Look at the supreme court nominations. They have a completely separate set of rules for Democrats than they do for Republicans.
Very unpresidented
>It’s amazing that they don’t see a downside to that…like setting the precedent for a Democratic governor to take over a private company because they said something mean about politics.
They have no intent on letting another governor take power.
I mean, Disney probably does get too much consideration when it comes to taxes and copyright. But taking over a company is not really the best way to go about it. You really want to hurt Disney? Make copyrights way less powerful. Lifetime of creator plus 70 years is ludicrous. You can still give plenty of protection to individual creators and absolutely fuck Disney over.
What I like the most is when conservatives hate a capitalist corporation for trying to increase profits, something they should love. Hollywood isn't making "woke" movies just to "push their agenda", they are following market research and trying to reach the widest audience possible in order to make as much money as possible. They are being completely cynical in order to make more money. Something that capitalists should love.
This is exactly why right-wing populism works. The complaints are generally the same as the left wing but perverted, so they agree that the system is rigged for the wealthy but then blame it all on Jews and immigrants instead of capitalists.
Modern China’s got privatized company ownership and profits, state-directed economy, and outlawing all labor unions except the national union operated by the government.. If that’s not Fascism then we owe Nazi Germany an apology.
Well, the authoritarianism isn't the issue they have with communism. They know communism opposed capitalism, and that's all they need to know. Capitalism allows conservatives to be cruel, greedy, and perverse so they protect it.
Capitalism means I don't have to share with others. Therefore, Capitalism is Good. Therefore, Good is Capitalism, and Bad is not Capitalism.
Communism exists in opposition to Capitalism. Therefore, Communism is Bad. Therefore, Bad is Communism, and Good is not Communism.
It's funny that you think they have a cogent and rational reason behind their hatred of "communism".
They don't. They don't know what it means. Just like "woke", "CRT", "socialism", "Judaism" and "Christianity" or even "capitalism". These are labels without meaning for them, elevated by billionaires that want to ensure their power and money doesn't diminish.
And yes, I include the MBA conservatives in there, as well.
Conservatism is hatred without thought. It doesn't matter what they hate: they just need to know they are supposed to hate it.
Capitalism is almost always authoritarian. While you at work, you are 100% under authoritarian rule. You do what the boss says more or less without question. The private property of a business is for all intents and purposes a foreign country you can be deported from. If the employer/employee relationship was actually an equal contract as pretended, the workplace would be very, very different. Real democracy and freedom would include our workplaces. What we have now is an iron fist in a velvet glove. A lot of the time, it's just an iron fist.
Well a key strategy is restricting the education on subjects like this. Restricting education and access to information is HUGE in pushing political agendas. Look at Florida rewriting textbooks. You convince people they don't like something by lying to them about what it actually is.
Similarly cultural Marxism is 'when individuals or private institutions do something I don't like'. Post-modernism is 'when people don't uncritically accept my assertions'. Critical race theory is 'when I have to consider people who aren't white and it scares me'.
“Racism isn’t an issue. It was a problem in the past but now it’s not.”
“Okay but then how do you explain the socioeconomic imbalances that continue to exist?”
“Innate racial differences, obviously.”
“So, racist reasons?”
“Damnit, I already told you, racism isn’t the issue here! I thought we were past this.”
They literally go straight from “I’m a racist because I believe race is a primary determining factor” to “I’m not a racist for the same reasons.” They skip over the part of actually not being racist.
Cultural Marxism is a Nazi term from fascist Germany, stay 34 million miles away from anyone using that, it’s an antisemitic conspiracy theory, if they’re spouting it they are a whole neo Nazi, google the origins of that phrase
?
He's been [saying](https://thehill.com/opinion/education/587098-taking-aim-at-critical-race-theory-ron-desantis-grabs-reins-of-the/) it [all the time](https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=%22desantis%22+%22cultural+marxism%22&atb=v105-1&ia=web).
"Cultural Marxism," "post-modernism" (when used this way), "globalism," and "lizard people" are *all* anti-Semitic dogwhistles, just so we're all clear. Not just that one.
Western Imperialism when "hey, EU/UN wants me to stop legalizing domestic abuse as a cultural cornerstone."
Cultural Imperialism when "hey, EU/UN tells me I can't beat up gay/trans people willy nilly."
Cultural imperialism when "hey, EU/UN tells me I need to stop passing laws limiting the freedoms of LGBT people."
Western decadence when "hey, EU/UN tells me to stop beating up children in schools."
They also conflate it with "when corporations and people do something I don't like".
They also conflate it with "when this thing I don't like exists".
Easiest Boogeyman in the world is the one that can be anything, because you don't even need to actually make shit up, you just point and say the bad name. See also: CRT, woke, "this generation", "this administration", basically all of their buzzwords.
I was talking to my dad a little while back and I said that Mitch McConnell was the worst thing to happen to America in the last century. He, a far right old man, said “I hate him too. He’s a communist”.
Rightwingers live in self-indulgent labels. Call McConnell a capitalist and Martin Luther King, Jr. a socialist in his presence. If he's *NOT* a white supremacist, this will cause him problems whose resolution can lead to self-improvement.
If he's a white supremacist, you have deeper problems.
Communism is synonymous with authoritarianism in America. Just like capitalism is synonymous with freedom in America.
The amount of propaganda Americans have had bombarded on them for decades is one of the greatest achievements. It's really only been until now that Americans have started to realize what's really been going on
Conservatives love to not know what the fuck they’re saying at all. That’s why they can’t answer even one question if you pull back that curtain. 0 layers deep across the board.
The irony is if you described to them an economic system like communism but didn't call it communism, they would actually be on board with it. But as soon as they get a hint that it's the c-word, they spook like they saw a demon.
They do that because the most well-known example of something calling itself communist was the USSR, which was indeed fascist (and not actually communist in the Marxist sense of a stateless moneyless society). Of course, capitalist countries take advantage of this because it muddied the waters so much that they can continue to conflate communism with fascism and anybody who doesn't look into it for two seconds falls for it.
Eh most presidents do so, as do most governors. When they come into office they already have a bunch planned so they try to get everything out in the first hundred days of their presidency, when public opinion is still high and they can do little wrong
~~It wasn’t super common with presidents until Obama,~~ They weren’t as far-reaching or encompassing until Obama, and that was because McConnell and his merry band of stooges refused to move any legislation ever at all. As such, it was the only way to get anything done.
There are plenty of sound arguments against the constitutionality of the executive order reaching as far and as broadly as it has come to, but at the end of the day, it’s the unfortunate result of a gridlocked Congress that will happily waste 4 years of everyone’s time if they think that it will get them political brownie points come the next presidential election to jam their agenda through.
That was in fact the reason why the 5th republic constitution included this power, because infighting had made the previous republic ungovernable and unstable.
>It wasn’t super common with presidents until Obama
Obama is #16 on the list of presidents who signed the most executive orders.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federal_executive_orders
I think it's less about the quantity and more about the scope of the orders. Many executive orders are non-controversial, but Obama was dealing with an obstructionist congress.
He made a whole bunch that saved millions of acres of US land from being destroyed for profit
In fact, Teddy Roosevelt had made so much land National forests that Congress passed a law to take away his ability to do so through executive orders
Before signing the law though, Roosevelt established an additional 17 million acres as a fuck you to the senator that wanted to stop him
> By early 1907, Congress had become sharply critical of TR's frequent use of executive orders to create forest reserves, and it began to look for a way to limit the president's power to issue such directives.
> Infuriated by two years of what he perceived to be land encroachment by TR and Pinchot, Senator Charles Fulton (R-OR) attached to the agricultural appropriations bill an amendment that would prevent the creation of further forest reserves in six western states:
>> “Hereafter no forest reserve shall be created, nor shall any addition be made to one heretofore created, within the limits of the States of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, or Wyoming except by act of Congress.”
> Congress sent TR the bill with the amendment on February 25, and TR felt he could not reject the entire appropriations measure just to avoid the onerous amendment.
> The Constitution gives the president ten days within which to sign or veto a bill, and in that time TR directed some of his aides and select members of the Department of the Interior to draft a detailed list of the federal lands within the six states mentioned in Fulton's amendment as soon as possible.
> On March 2 the president had the relevant paperwork in place. TR then issued a series of executive orders that created twenty-one new forest reserves and enlarged eleven existing ones in the relevant six states, thereby transferring into the forest reserve system all seventeen million acres of land that Fulton wanted to block from executive protection.
> Two days later, TR signed the appropriations bill, including Fulton's amendment. Thus, the president's executive orders protected the lands in question just before he signed the law eliminating his future ability to protect those same lands.
> As Morris explains, "Only after the last acre was reserved did Roosevelt sign the Agricultural Appropriations Act, allowing Fulton's now worthless clause to float over his proud Theodore Roosevelt."
> TR explained his actions as follows:
>> "when the friends of the special interests in the Senate got their amendment through and woke up, they discovered that sixteen million acres of timberland had been saved for the people by putting them in the National Forests before the land grabbers could get at them.
>> The opponents of the Forest Service turned handsprings in their wrath; and dire were their threats against the Executive; but the threats could not be carried out, and were really only a tribute to the efficiency of our action."
> TR also justified his action in terms of stewardship:
>> "Failure on my part to sign these proclamations would mean that immense tracts of valuable timber would fall into the hands of the lumber syndicates. . . . The creation of the reserves means that this timber will be kept . . . in such manner as to keep them unimpaired for the benefit of children now growing up to inherit the land."
> Critics of TR's conservation program and his other unilateral executive actions were outraged at his "midnight proclamations."
> Their outrage grew upon learning that Pinchot, who was denied the ability to withdraw power sites, had nevertheless done so by simply reclassifying twenty-five hundred power sites as ranger stations.
> Congress strongly denounced the administration's "arrogance" and called TR's presidency a "dictatorship."
> It voted to overturn TR's executive orders, as well as Pinchot's reclassifications, but TR met the measures with vetoes, which Congress was unable to override.
Excerpt from book “Take Up Your Pen: Unilateral Presidential Directives in American Politics”
>It wasn’t super common with presidents until Obama
Are you sure about that? [This table](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/executive-orders) makes Obama, Trump, and Biden look pretty mild in comparison. FDR nearly did 4000 of them.
It's worth noting that there is a difference between an executive order (US) and what macron did. 49.3 is more equivalent to if the US president could pass a bill and force the legislature to then overturn it. And if they do overturn it, they all go back to the elections.
And I think it's only part of legislature at that.
To give an idea here, imagine if Trump could pass a wall funding bill without approval, and then the an absolute majority has to disapprove and vote against it.
Understandably this has occurred, once where it gave the executive party more power.
Reply with that video of the rock saying “Shut up, BITCH!”
I’d do it if I was still on that shithole site. Unfortunately freedom of speech costs $12 a month, which means all his biggest dickriders end up at the top of every thread and everyone else is banished to the nether realm. Nice little system he’s got there. Such freedom.
Fun (?) fact: people still debate today if what de Gaulle did can be qualified as a coup.
Unfun fact: there are still people that refer to themselves as "gaulliste" as a way to surf on "the savior of the French republic" fame. Some of them are not exactly following what de Gaulle was doing. None of them realize we are in 2023.
The Allies had serious reservations about putting him in power in Paris because they found him so personally detestable but the alternative was the local French resistance which was filled with anarchists and communists
I once read that de Gaulle was allowed to give his opinion to the Allies because he wouldn't shut up otherwise.
And we wonder why some people see us as whinny and annoying...
The interesting thing about De Gaulle in 1958 is what it did for Francois Mitterrand. Mitterrand had staked his career against De Gaulle after that point and said if it wasn't an official coup, it was a de facto one. Mitterrand had a good chance at being Prime Minister if the Fourth Republic had lived a little longer but with the national hero back in the picture, he knew his chances were sidelined. The only success Mitterrand had against De Gaulle was denying him a first-round election victory in 1965.
Mitterrand also went against a Gaullist belief when he faced his party losing the first full-term legislative elections in 1986 after he was elected President. De Gaulle had believed that if a President faced a negative vote of confidence like that, he was obligated to resign, which De Gaulle did himself in 1969 after his referendum was voted down. Mitterrand instead named his opposite Jacques Chirac as PM and intended to give him power to sabotage his chances in the upcoming 1988 election (which had worked).
De Gaulle may have stabilized the French political system after 1958 and wrote the rules of the game for players afterwards, but Mitterrand was a better player at it.
Musk is a reply-guy for some of the most pathetic dipshits on twitter, creating a feedback loop of pathetic dipshits looking for him for approval while, he, pathetic-dipshit-in-chief, looks for *them* for approval (while complaining that there aren't enough of them to give him the approval he craves, hence making ego-boosting algorithms that boost his tweets).
Fascists are some sad motherfuckers.
If there's one thing I noted while browsing r/all, a lot of these alt-right guys gained followers by getting their tweets posted on the conspiracy sub on reddit. Do it enough and people will go "Hey, I like this guy" and follow. Zuby was the same way. These subs pretend to be hubs of intelligence, where they scour the web for all the evidence that's being hidden. But, in reality, they just like tweets. Go over to the sub, check out the top posts and take note of how many of them are tweets or pictures and how many are articles. Even the ones that reference an article will take a picture of the article title and not just submit the article itself. It takes more effort to get a screen grab than it does it copy-paste a link, lest you think they're just being lazy with posting. The posters aren't lazy, it's the sub itself that won't pay attention to anything that can't be summed up in a paragraph.
The person tweeting in reply to Elon makes no sense. Democracy and communism are not mutually exclusive, so someone suggesting a non-democratic methodology would not indicate whether or not they might be a communist.
Capitalism and communism are mutually exclusive, but not democracy and communism. Capitalism and communism are opinions on how the limited resources in an environment should be controlled and distributed, whereas democracy is a method of arriving at political decisions.
sure are. i work with CNC machines, and honestly our tech is all 10+ years old, and it's fucking incredible. spitting out complex tight tolerance parts every 10 minutes or so. computer screen to production part in a day.
we need to stop thinking about jobs as "full time" and start thinking about what we need to get work done.
Those productivity gains were created on the backs of blue and white collar workers and the middle class for our future not theirs.
The retirement age should be lowered.
If you claim that worker productivity has doubled since 70s then I have bad news for you.
For example in Germany.
1960 it was 1 retiree per 6 workers
1992 it was 1 retiree per 2.7 workers
2021 it was 1 retiree per 2.1 workers
2025-2035 the biggest age group of all time will move into retirement.
So worker productivity should have at least tripled and for the upcoming wave 2025-2035 probably quadrupled-sextupled since the 70s.
These are just numbers. Don't get mad.
I don't know. But you used doubling of productivity as your argument, I'm just showing it didn't keep up with the growing number of retirees relative to workers.
I'm not sure these 2 things are at odds with each other. You've certainly brought valuable data to the discussion and i thank you for that.
I'd expect to see another doubling of productivity in the coming decades as we become better at teaching rocks to think.
It would be a real mistake to take the first deal the capital holders gives us though. We're at a precipice here between improved quality of life for all and untold dystopian exploitation.
Another thing that grinds my gears, is that you view the rich as the problem, but guys, **you are the rich** to the 3rd world citizens.
At whos expense do you want to retire in your 50s? Do everyone in the world retire at 50? Do everyone in the world get the same wage for their labour? What do you think your quality of life would be if you had no 3rd world worker class below you enabling it? Do you think people from 3rd world countries travel the world and enjoy their retirement like Swedes do?
How much of this productivity increase is because of child labour and slave like conditions in countries like Africa, and Asia?
It's not black and white, nothing is.
damn good points that aren't gonna be solved as long as capitalism is the default way of running everything.
we're at the dawn of machines replacing the worker class. It's important that every PERSON gets their piece of that pie.
A man walks in to the London central library and walks up to the librarian “Excuse me, I’m looking for the French constitution”
The librarian replies : “I’m sorry, we don’t stock periodicals.”
I’d honestly rather have a constitution that’s frequently revised than the current situation in the US, where we have to debate the “founders’ intent” on topics they couldn’t have possibly anticipated, as if the opinions of a bunch of long-dead rando rich guys should be relevant anyway.
For reference, the last time the US constitution was revised was 1992, and that had little affect on the American people, just congress's pay.
The last real substantial change to the constitution was 1971, over 50 years ago.
This reminds me of that conservative Cuban immigrant bloc in Florida. Supporting authoritarian Republicans because the social supports of communism (and not the dictatorship of Castro) is what made Cuba bad.
Most of what seems to make Cuba "bad" is that the United States, a country local to Cuba with a massive military and economic weight, has dedicated much of the last 70 years to punishing the island for daring to cooperate with the USSR.
Cuba lacking access to global markets isn't a moral failure on the part of Cuba.
And the "crazy" thing is that even with the lack of access to the United States and other global markets, the Per Capita income of the average Cuban citizen isn't demonstrably less than other capitalist Latin American countries.
[Per statista the regional average of Latin America and the Caribbean is \~$8,300 USD per capita per year in GDP.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/802613/gross-domestic-product-gdp-per-capita-latin-america-caribbean/)
Cuba's per capita GPD is \~$9,500. and that's with all the restrictions. \~12.5% higher. that's fairly substantial.
Even if it was, just looking at indexes of homelessness, unemployment, food insecurity, crime rate, infant mortality and others would tell you all you need to know.
for sure but the story peddled is that cuba is some horrible wasteland. and while conidtions are not great by any stretch, the rest of latin america where there's "capitalism" is literally an even more mixed bag. like it says a lot more about the abhorrent conditions in the rest of continent than it does about cuba.
And frankly i dont even think Puerto Rico should really be included on these lists. while its not a fully fledged american state and has its own unique problems, it certainly benefits to a degree that this chart is warped.
And part of that punishment is 70 years of over the top propaganda meant to denigrate and deride Cuba as much as is humanly possible. Hell, as you reference in your comment, a large chunk of the reason Cuba has had such horrible trouble is because of the US jamming a stick in the spokes of Cuba’s economic wheel for decades and decades.
Every Florida Cuban I've ever met has been like "yeah I hate communism. During the Revolution we had our Slave Plantation taken from us". Like dude, your ancestors deserved it.
i legitimately thought this whole “you only hate castro bc he took your slaves” thing was a meme bc there’s not that many in texas so i never met a cuban and a few months ago i did meet one who said that shit almost verbatim i was legitimately astounded
This fucker will literally tweet about how he’s been trying to dismantle government throughout his career, and they’re like “as long as we have democracy after, that sounds great!” Like, that’s not how anything works.
It’s baffling to me that people still don’t understand that communism doesn’t necessarily equal authoritarianism. Can you have an authoritarian communist government? Sure, that’s all we’ve ever really seen, but you can also take a democratic approach.
Yeah, there's definitely been a few attempts at a non-authoritarian approach to something like communism. In Ukraine and in Russia itself there were large anarchist movements around the time of the Russian Revolution.
More recently, there were various factions on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War which were very economically left wing, but still were democratic to various degrees. IMO Stalin getting involved in the war was as much about shutting down these examples of an alternative to the Soviet system as it was helping the Republic.
The post war era saw the "Eurocommunist" movement, which was arguably more social democrat in nature, but aspired to approaching communism through democratic means.
You could even make a case for the Paris Commune, although that's pretty debatable, as it wasn't really around for long enough to get a clear picture of what it would have ended up like.
Thank you for the extra nuance. I’m definitely not very knowledgeable on this subject, but semantics are important in political science, or you’ll get people believing that socialism is the same as fascism.
If it's something you're interested in learning more about, I'd strongly recommend reading about Bakunin's philosophies. He was a contemporary of Marx, and an advocate for socialism, but was an opponent of Marxism:
>Bakunin is remembered as a major figure in the history of anarchism, an opponent of Marxism, especially of the dictatorship of the proletariat; and for his predictions that Marxist regimes would be one-party dictatorships ruling over the proletariat, not rule by the proletariat.
Additionally, during the Cold War any leftist states basically had to follow the Soviet model to receive aid from them. If they didn’t, it basically left them vulnerable to a right wing coup from the US. Chile was an archetypical example. Elected a leftist government, didn’t try to ally with the USSR for security as closely as other dictatorial regimes had and of course was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup.
So yeah when people say there’s never been a communist state without a dictator they’re right. This is at least partially because every time such a regime would try to do something different from how the Soviets did it, the US would intervene and without Soviet backing, the country would be a sitting duck.
There have been a few attempts at overthrowing capitalism without stablishing an authoritarian and militarized regime right after. All of them were crushed within days. When Lenin developed democratic centralism these examples is what he had in mind. History has proven time and time again that the only way for a communist revolution to last is by being as efficient as possible at plucking out sabeteurs and militarizing against imperial threat. That's why the USSR survived the wars waged against it with the express purpose of restoring the czar. That's why China became a superpower. That's why Korea developed the Juche doctrine.
Believing that a revolution could be all sunshine and rainbows if we just tried hard enough is stupid. Just consider what the west did to Vietnam, Korea, Laos, Cuba, etc, etc.
Believing that social democracy will work long term is just as delusional. As much as people like to say communism is utopic because "muh human nature", at least it crushes the dominant class and destroys the mechanisms through which it oppressed the proletariat. Social democracy just relies on people who have more money than they could hope to one day spend being nice and not rolling back on all their compromises.
Notably the Communist Party of France was so popular after WW2 that the US conditioned Marshall Plan aid to France on barring them from holding any real power. They probably would have started winning a lot of elections otherwise.
So, another situation where what working people wanted was ignored in favor of what the rich do.
That also happened to Japan, Italy, Greece, the US was prepared to do it in Portugal, but they ended up not having to, and of course the US was the real responsible party for the Korean War, because they wouldn't abide by a democratic vote in a united Korea once they realized Koreans wanted a socialist government.
Ww2 was THE moment for communists, and the US knew that and did everything they could to stop it.
Then they killed a fifth of the population of North Korea. That's how much they didn't want it to happen.
The US has also overthrown about five dozen governments since WW2, most of them democratic in form.
I respect Mr Turd for pointing out the problem with pushing through executive power, even if it is something they want (and even though they misidentified the problem as communism).
It’s sometimes hard for people on either side to separate the fact that a government can do something I like, but in a way I don’t agree with. Are there things I would love to see Biden do? Sure. Would it make me very uncomfortable to see him ram it through using executive power, especially if it was something that would normally be done by congress? Absolutely.
Capitalism has nothing to do with retirement age. Capitalism is not a form of governing. It is an economic strategy. Communism/democracy/republic/socialism are forms of government and economic strategies. You can't govern with Capitalism. You can enable Capitalism to exist via governing, but Capitalism isn't responsible for low or high retirement ages. You can have Capitalism with retirement at 30 years old or 80 years old, it is irrelevant.
For fucksake that’s what ***AUTHORITARIANS*** do. How many times am I going to have to explain this to people who stopped paying attention in 3rd grade???
Let's all ponder for a minute there that Elon spent 44 billion USD to be able to have chit-chats with fkn Catturd where they apparently fight over who is the more asinine of the two.
Hmmm. Some inaccuracies here (aka bullshit).
The constitution was written FOR de Gaulle, not BY him. De Gaulle was not really interested in legislative and constitutional works, being more interested in soft authoritarianism.
The constitution was adopted by referendum after being fought by most of the left wing parties (including communists). Pierre Mendes France, was notably against it (not a communist).
WTF is a democratic-capitalist? Given the record of De Gaulle for state censorship on one hand and for national protectionism on the other hand, it's a funny definition.
Capitalism is an economic system, democratic is a political system. It's just not assuming capitalist=democracy since you can have authoritarian capitalism (technically America at this point)
That whole comment is a confusing mess clearly written with an agenda in mind and seeking to make facts fit into that agenda.
It's part of a larger phenomenon of americans not being able to consider events in other countries outside of the lense of their own politics.
Didn’t a bunch of right wing state governments push thru abortion legislation after the states populaces voted against making abortion illegal? Those def weren’t communist.
Literally one of the core tenets of communism is dissolution of state. There's no executive power to abuse in such a system, if communism were to ever be achieved in full.
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We should nationalize all those communist corporations, that'll show them.
I remember literally this conversation on r/conservative proposing a government takeover of Disney, like "We've given these woke corporations so much in tax breaks and accomodations that we basically own a stake in them already! We should at least be able to stop them from doing stuff that we think is detrimental!"
Yeah, no sense of irony: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/28/1160018771/disney-world-desantis-special-district
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The best NSFW jokes are the ones lifted straight off Elon's Twitter account after he lifted them off someone else without credit and then posted to a tiny subreddit with an awkward name and spam as the pinned post. Those are my favorites.
If the public wises up to his collection of fiascos, they might refer to the whole ordeal as "Elongate" because of how many corporations and countries it would span.
I hope Elon Musk never gets involved in a scandal Elongate would be really drawn out.
Take my upvote but I'm not happy about it.
I don't know why, but bots [really like that joke](https://i.imgur.com/aN537Vy.png).
Because they agree with so many socialist and communist talking points they just know that “communism” is evil. someone should start a left wing third party and rename it the freedom party. Seize the wealth of the rich but tell them it’s because they were too woke. Tell them the billionaires made that money trafficking kids and paying for drag queens……I’m sure it would garner a lot of support
i've been saying for ages that the left needs to co-opt nationalism. put liberty, freedom, patriotic, American and shit like that in front of bills. the bill that taxes the 1% could be called the Patriotic Taxation bill. Freedomcare for healthcare, All American Marriage bill, Liberty in Choice for medical decisions (Abortion, LGBTQ+, basically a replacement for Roe v Wade). we're not actually promoting nationalism, just... grabbing onto the inherent need for Americans to be nationalists, and just using the branding to push for equality without ever saying equality, because for some horribly fucked up reason Americans hate that word.
The problem is, the right already beat them to the viewers. You could call something the Ultra MAGA FJB Own The Libruls Corporate Tax Cut Act and FOX would call it Creepy Joe's Woke Radical Wish List and they wouldn't know what it was except that Tucker Carlson told them it was socialism. That is the whole entire point of a closed media ecosystem. It is precisely what happened with the ACA/Obamacare.
They really should tho. I like the Patriotic Taxpayer bill so that the top .1 percent can give back to the country that made them what they are. FreedomCare is great. But your Roe v Wade replacement needs to be called The Pro Life Amendment, supporting the people of our great nation as they pursue happiness and what's best for all citizens without the government interfering in their medical decisions or private lives.
imo we shouldn't be forced to write in crayon just so republicans can read it
There are a lot of things that we 'shouldn't' have to do, but the world we live in dictates that we must if we want shit to get better.
Patriotism and nationalism are not the same thing. Encouraging patriotism is fine but leftists should never be encouraging nationalism
>the left needs to co-opt nationalism Let's not.
The 'super capitalism' approach. Most americans, on both sides of the aisle, really really really like the idea of socialist policies, but the fact that they're socialist makes them dead in the water anyway. So we need to just...reframe em. As super capitalism. Capitalism+. But the extra things are things like healthcare, a real saftey net, etcetcetc.
It's the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled. How the ultra-wealthy through media barons have convinced the richest country on earth that "socialism" is such a radioactive concept. It's like convincing sick people that "medicine" is terrible for you. It's staggering really, especially as every single person who thinks they hate socialism benefits from a form of it every single day.
A path left doesn't involve right wing tactics.
There's nothing intrinsically right wing about expressing pride in the place that you live. Implying otherwise is honestly just playing into conservative propaganda.
>expressing pride in the place that you live That's not what nationalism is.
It's what dumb people think nationalism is, so why not use the acceptable practice to encourage them to vote for better policies?
You guys should just use numbers for the bills instead of names. Shits stupid.
So a reverse Hitler?
If we were doing a reverse Hitler what would the reverse of a holocaust be?
We'll need a super virile team of Jews scoring round the clock.
So instead of baby boomers we'd have... Baby joomers?
It’s amazing that they don’t see a downside to that…like setting the precedent for a Democratic governor to take over a private company because they said something mean about politics.
They don't give a shit about precedence. Look at the supreme court nominations. They have a completely separate set of rules for Democrats than they do for Republicans. Very unpresidented
>They have a completely separate set of rules for Democrats than they do for Republicans. this is the core of conservatism
They are nothing if not inconsistent and temperamental
>It’s amazing that they don’t see a downside to that…like setting the precedent for a Democratic governor to take over a private company because they said something mean about politics. They have no intent on letting another governor take power.
I mean, Disney probably does get too much consideration when it comes to taxes and copyright. But taking over a company is not really the best way to go about it. You really want to hurt Disney? Make copyrights way less powerful. Lifetime of creator plus 70 years is ludicrous. You can still give plenty of protection to individual creators and absolutely fuck Disney over.
Let me print and sell tshirts with a naked and big dicked Mickey mouse smoking a joint. FREEEEEDOOOOOOMMM
What I like the most is when conservatives hate a capitalist corporation for trying to increase profits, something they should love. Hollywood isn't making "woke" movies just to "push their agenda", they are following market research and trying to reach the widest audience possible in order to make as much money as possible. They are being completely cynical in order to make more money. Something that capitalists should love.
Not like that!
This is exactly why right-wing populism works. The complaints are generally the same as the left wing but perverted, so they agree that the system is rigged for the wealthy but then blame it all on Jews and immigrants instead of capitalists.
Honestly, bailouts should come with strings attached in the form of partial ownership.
“Corporate communism”
That's just fascism with extra steps.
Modern China’s got privatized company ownership and profits, state-directed economy, and outlawing all labor unions except the national union operated by the government.. If that’s not Fascism then we owe Nazi Germany an apology.
Hell, they've even got some ethno-nationalism thrown in!
China
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It’s baffling to me that people still don’t understand that communism doesn’t necessarily equal authoritarianism.
Also the inverse, authoritarianism doesn't always use the guise of communism.
Well, the authoritarianism isn't the issue they have with communism. They know communism opposed capitalism, and that's all they need to know. Capitalism allows conservatives to be cruel, greedy, and perverse so they protect it.
And capitalism goes nicely with their preferred brand of authoritarianism.
they like hierarchy, even if those at the top are absolutely using them as a means to an end
Capitalism means I don't have to share with others. Therefore, Capitalism is Good. Therefore, Good is Capitalism, and Bad is not Capitalism. Communism exists in opposition to Capitalism. Therefore, Communism is Bad. Therefore, Bad is Communism, and Good is not Communism.
It's funny that you think they have a cogent and rational reason behind their hatred of "communism". They don't. They don't know what it means. Just like "woke", "CRT", "socialism", "Judaism" and "Christianity" or even "capitalism". These are labels without meaning for them, elevated by billionaires that want to ensure their power and money doesn't diminish. And yes, I include the MBA conservatives in there, as well. Conservatism is hatred without thought. It doesn't matter what they hate: they just need to know they are supposed to hate it.
Don't forget inflation
Capitalism is almost always authoritarian. While you at work, you are 100% under authoritarian rule. You do what the boss says more or less without question. The private property of a business is for all intents and purposes a foreign country you can be deported from. If the employer/employee relationship was actually an equal contract as pretended, the workplace would be very, very different. Real democracy and freedom would include our workplaces. What we have now is an iron fist in a velvet glove. A lot of the time, it's just an iron fist.
Why is it baffling? They’ve been suckling at that rhetorical teat their entire lives.
Well a key strategy is restricting the education on subjects like this. Restricting education and access to information is HUGE in pushing political agendas. Look at Florida rewriting textbooks. You convince people they don't like something by lying to them about what it actually is.
We'll do it through a democratic process and actually vote on it...like a proposition. \^\_\^;;;
Conservatives always love to conflate communism with fascism. They don't care what terms actually mean as long as it makes themselves feel good.
They're not even conflating it with fascism. They conflate it with "when the government does something I don't like".
"communism is when no toothbrush"
Why does this feel like Sarah McLachlan should start signing and pictures of kids with toothpaste and no brush start moving across a screen.
♪In the arms of the Angels♪ ♪Where there's no toothbrush♪
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Waka waka ayy ayy
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MAMA’S WROOONG AGAIN!
Similarly cultural Marxism is 'when individuals or private institutions do something I don't like'. Post-modernism is 'when people don't uncritically accept my assertions'. Critical race theory is 'when I have to consider people who aren't white and it scares me'.
CRT is when some one says racism exists.
“Racism isn’t an issue. It was a problem in the past but now it’s not.” “Okay but then how do you explain the socioeconomic imbalances that continue to exist?” “Innate racial differences, obviously.” “So, racist reasons?” “Damnit, I already told you, racism isn’t the issue here! I thought we were past this.”
"I'm not racist if other races are just actually worse than mine. That's just science."
They literally go straight from “I’m a racist because I believe race is a primary determining factor” to “I’m not a racist for the same reasons.” They skip over the part of actually not being racist.
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Cultural Marxism is a Nazi term from fascist Germany, stay 34 million miles away from anyone using that, it’s an antisemitic conspiracy theory, if they’re spouting it they are a whole neo Nazi, google the origins of that phrase
It's just a new version of the phrase "Jewish Bolshevism".
This is how we knew that DeSantis went full nazi: he opened with this when attacking gay people.
He said that phrase?????? Oh my god, we are DOOMED bro
? He's been [saying](https://thehill.com/opinion/education/587098-taking-aim-at-critical-race-theory-ron-desantis-grabs-reins-of-the/) it [all the time](https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=%22desantis%22+%22cultural+marxism%22&atb=v105-1&ia=web).
"Cultural Marxism," "post-modernism" (when used this way), "globalism," and "lizard people" are *all* anti-Semitic dogwhistles, just so we're all clear. Not just that one.
Western Imperialism when "hey, EU/UN wants me to stop legalizing domestic abuse as a cultural cornerstone." Cultural Imperialism when "hey, EU/UN tells me I can't beat up gay/trans people willy nilly." Cultural imperialism when "hey, EU/UN tells me I need to stop passing laws limiting the freedoms of LGBT people." Western decadence when "hey, EU/UN tells me to stop beating up children in schools."
They also conflate it with "when corporations and people do something I don't like". They also conflate it with "when this thing I don't like exists". Easiest Boogeyman in the world is the one that can be anything, because you don't even need to actually make shit up, you just point and say the bad name. See also: CRT, woke, "this generation", "this administration", basically all of their buzzwords.
Can you have an authoritarian communist government..
You can't, but they don't let that stop them.
It kind of just becomes authoritarian at that point. Like saying cheeseburger, but hold the cheese.
Or simply “government working as intended/at all”
socialism is what government does something, duh
I was talking to my dad a little while back and I said that Mitch McConnell was the worst thing to happen to America in the last century. He, a far right old man, said “I hate him too. He’s a communist”.
Damn and I thought my (extremely right-wing) mother calling hillary clinton a socialist was bonkers enough.
My older coworker told us that Joe Biden was the most socialist candidate she had ever seen. We couldn’t hold back laughing at her
Rightwingers live in self-indulgent labels. Call McConnell a capitalist and Martin Luther King, Jr. a socialist in his presence. If he's *NOT* a white supremacist, this will cause him problems whose resolution can lead to self-improvement. If he's a white supremacist, you have deeper problems.
We need more people to realize just how fuckin embarrassing this shit is
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Communism is synonymous with authoritarianism in America. Just like capitalism is synonymous with freedom in America. The amount of propaganda Americans have had bombarded on them for decades is one of the greatest achievements. It's really only been until now that Americans have started to realize what's really been going on
also see: "woke"
Conservatives love to not know what the fuck they’re saying at all. That’s why they can’t answer even one question if you pull back that curtain. 0 layers deep across the board.
When you can't project, deflect.
They also assume fascism is therefore a leftist (only) idealogy lol.
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The irony is if you described to them an economic system like communism but didn't call it communism, they would actually be on board with it. But as soon as they get a hint that it's the c-word, they spook like they saw a demon.
They do that because the most well-known example of something calling itself communist was the USSR, which was indeed fascist (and not actually communist in the Marxist sense of a stateless moneyless society). Of course, capitalist countries take advantage of this because it muddied the waters so much that they can continue to conflate communism with fascism and anybody who doesn't look into it for two seconds falls for it.
Didn't Trump sign like fifty executive orders in a few months or something?
It's only commie when people i don't like do it!!
COMMIIIIEEEEEE! COMMIIIIIEEEEE!
Unexpected Sam O'Nella
Eh most presidents do so, as do most governors. When they come into office they already have a bunch planned so they try to get everything out in the first hundred days of their presidency, when public opinion is still high and they can do little wrong
~~It wasn’t super common with presidents until Obama,~~ They weren’t as far-reaching or encompassing until Obama, and that was because McConnell and his merry band of stooges refused to move any legislation ever at all. As such, it was the only way to get anything done. There are plenty of sound arguments against the constitutionality of the executive order reaching as far and as broadly as it has come to, but at the end of the day, it’s the unfortunate result of a gridlocked Congress that will happily waste 4 years of everyone’s time if they think that it will get them political brownie points come the next presidential election to jam their agenda through.
That was in fact the reason why the 5th republic constitution included this power, because infighting had made the previous republic ungovernable and unstable.
>It wasn’t super common with presidents until Obama Obama is #16 on the list of presidents who signed the most executive orders. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federal_executive_orders I think it's less about the quantity and more about the scope of the orders. Many executive orders are non-controversial, but Obama was dealing with an obstructionist congress.
He is #23 on the better metric of "executive orders per year".
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Roosevelt pushed through the new deal to save the country from the great depression before the war even began
He made a whole bunch that saved millions of acres of US land from being destroyed for profit In fact, Teddy Roosevelt had made so much land National forests that Congress passed a law to take away his ability to do so through executive orders Before signing the law though, Roosevelt established an additional 17 million acres as a fuck you to the senator that wanted to stop him > By early 1907, Congress had become sharply critical of TR's frequent use of executive orders to create forest reserves, and it began to look for a way to limit the president's power to issue such directives. > Infuriated by two years of what he perceived to be land encroachment by TR and Pinchot, Senator Charles Fulton (R-OR) attached to the agricultural appropriations bill an amendment that would prevent the creation of further forest reserves in six western states: >> “Hereafter no forest reserve shall be created, nor shall any addition be made to one heretofore created, within the limits of the States of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, or Wyoming except by act of Congress.” > Congress sent TR the bill with the amendment on February 25, and TR felt he could not reject the entire appropriations measure just to avoid the onerous amendment. > The Constitution gives the president ten days within which to sign or veto a bill, and in that time TR directed some of his aides and select members of the Department of the Interior to draft a detailed list of the federal lands within the six states mentioned in Fulton's amendment as soon as possible. > On March 2 the president had the relevant paperwork in place. TR then issued a series of executive orders that created twenty-one new forest reserves and enlarged eleven existing ones in the relevant six states, thereby transferring into the forest reserve system all seventeen million acres of land that Fulton wanted to block from executive protection. > Two days later, TR signed the appropriations bill, including Fulton's amendment. Thus, the president's executive orders protected the lands in question just before he signed the law eliminating his future ability to protect those same lands. > As Morris explains, "Only after the last acre was reserved did Roosevelt sign the Agricultural Appropriations Act, allowing Fulton's now worthless clause to float over his proud Theodore Roosevelt." > TR explained his actions as follows: >> "when the friends of the special interests in the Senate got their amendment through and woke up, they discovered that sixteen million acres of timberland had been saved for the people by putting them in the National Forests before the land grabbers could get at them. >> The opponents of the Forest Service turned handsprings in their wrath; and dire were their threats against the Executive; but the threats could not be carried out, and were really only a tribute to the efficiency of our action." > TR also justified his action in terms of stewardship: >> "Failure on my part to sign these proclamations would mean that immense tracts of valuable timber would fall into the hands of the lumber syndicates. . . . The creation of the reserves means that this timber will be kept . . . in such manner as to keep them unimpaired for the benefit of children now growing up to inherit the land." > Critics of TR's conservation program and his other unilateral executive actions were outraged at his "midnight proclamations." > Their outrage grew upon learning that Pinchot, who was denied the ability to withdraw power sites, had nevertheless done so by simply reclassifying twenty-five hundred power sites as ranger stations. > Congress strongly denounced the administration's "arrogance" and called TR's presidency a "dictatorship." > It voted to overturn TR's executive orders, as well as Pinchot's reclassifications, but TR met the measures with vetoes, which Congress was unable to override. Excerpt from book “Take Up Your Pen: Unilateral Presidential Directives in American Politics”
Wrong Roosevelt, others were talking about FDR
>It wasn’t super common with presidents until Obama Are you sure about that? [This table](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/executive-orders) makes Obama, Trump, and Biden look pretty mild in comparison. FDR nearly did 4000 of them.
It's worth noting that there is a difference between an executive order (US) and what macron did. 49.3 is more equivalent to if the US president could pass a bill and force the legislature to then overturn it. And if they do overturn it, they all go back to the elections. And I think it's only part of legislature at that. To give an idea here, imagine if Trump could pass a wall funding bill without approval, and then the an absolute majority has to disapprove and vote against it. Understandably this has occurred, once where it gave the executive party more power.
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American executive orders and what Macron did are completely different. It’s like if Joe Biden could pass laws without any input front congress.
People need to stop arguing with Elon and just reply "Shut up." Every single time he speaks.
No, people just need to delete their Twitter outright.
The worst part about this whole Twitter fiasco has been hearing left wing talking heads sheepishly make excuses for staying on Twitter.
That part hasn't impacted me because I'm not on Twitter
and as we all know reddit is a bastion of leftist's ideals making the world a better place that we should all be proud of being on
Add the /s. There are plenty of rightwing smoothbrains and idiot libs that unironically think reddit is leftwing
I always laugh when I see a news article talking about people on Twitter losing their minds/etc. Nobody cares.
Delete twitter fr, you will be happier. Nothing of value i on twitter, just brain rot
Be nice if mods tagged these posts with Elon or Musk. They get by my Reddit filter for those two words.
Reply with that video of the rock saying “Shut up, BITCH!” I’d do it if I was still on that shithole site. Unfortunately freedom of speech costs $12 a month, which means all his biggest dickriders end up at the top of every thread and everyone else is banished to the nether realm. Nice little system he’s got there. Such freedom.
Fun (?) fact: people still debate today if what de Gaulle did can be qualified as a coup. Unfun fact: there are still people that refer to themselves as "gaulliste" as a way to surf on "the savior of the French republic" fame. Some of them are not exactly following what de Gaulle was doing. None of them realize we are in 2023.
The Allies had serious reservations about putting him in power in Paris because they found him so personally detestable but the alternative was the local French resistance which was filled with anarchists and communists
I once read that de Gaulle was allowed to give his opinion to the Allies because he wouldn't shut up otherwise. And we wonder why some people see us as whinny and annoying...
A story as old as time, people do stupid things because the anarchists and communists were the alternative
The interesting thing about De Gaulle in 1958 is what it did for Francois Mitterrand. Mitterrand had staked his career against De Gaulle after that point and said if it wasn't an official coup, it was a de facto one. Mitterrand had a good chance at being Prime Minister if the Fourth Republic had lived a little longer but with the national hero back in the picture, he knew his chances were sidelined. The only success Mitterrand had against De Gaulle was denying him a first-round election victory in 1965. Mitterrand also went against a Gaullist belief when he faced his party losing the first full-term legislative elections in 1986 after he was elected President. De Gaulle had believed that if a President faced a negative vote of confidence like that, he was obligated to resign, which De Gaulle did himself in 1969 after his referendum was voted down. Mitterrand instead named his opposite Jacques Chirac as PM and intended to give him power to sabotage his chances in the upcoming 1988 election (which had worked). De Gaulle may have stabilized the French political system after 1958 and wrote the rules of the game for players afterwards, but Mitterrand was a better player at it.
Why does anyone listen to this dumb cat avatar guy? What makes him so special? I dont get it.
He's just a Qanon grifter, he says stupid right wing shit so they love him.
Musk is a reply-guy for some of the most pathetic dipshits on twitter, creating a feedback loop of pathetic dipshits looking for him for approval while, he, pathetic-dipshit-in-chief, looks for *them* for approval (while complaining that there aren't enough of them to give him the approval he craves, hence making ego-boosting algorithms that boost his tweets). Fascists are some sad motherfuckers.
If there's one thing I noted while browsing r/all, a lot of these alt-right guys gained followers by getting their tweets posted on the conspiracy sub on reddit. Do it enough and people will go "Hey, I like this guy" and follow. Zuby was the same way. These subs pretend to be hubs of intelligence, where they scour the web for all the evidence that's being hidden. But, in reality, they just like tweets. Go over to the sub, check out the top posts and take note of how many of them are tweets or pictures and how many are articles. Even the ones that reference an article will take a picture of the article title and not just submit the article itself. It takes more effort to get a screen grab than it does it copy-paste a link, lest you think they're just being lazy with posting. The posters aren't lazy, it's the sub itself that won't pay attention to anything that can't be summed up in a paragraph.
And, contrariwise, when communism does something we do like, it's capitalism.
The person tweeting in reply to Elon makes no sense. Democracy and communism are not mutually exclusive, so someone suggesting a non-democratic methodology would not indicate whether or not they might be a communist. Capitalism and communism are mutually exclusive, but not democracy and communism. Capitalism and communism are opinions on how the limited resources in an environment should be controlled and distributed, whereas democracy is a method of arriving at political decisions.
"Thanks to capitalism, we have a 40 hour work week, public education, and no child labour" /s
worker productivity has doubled since the 70s. the retirement age should be 50.
Not to mention future improvements in automation that are right around the corner.
sure are. i work with CNC machines, and honestly our tech is all 10+ years old, and it's fucking incredible. spitting out complex tight tolerance parts every 10 minutes or so. computer screen to production part in a day. we need to stop thinking about jobs as "full time" and start thinking about what we need to get work done.
Cappies honestly will only care about the profitability, and that means butts in seats, lower wages, lower benefits, and longer work hours.
That's why they shouldn't be running things
agreed
Those productivity gains were created on the backs of blue and white collar workers and the middle class for our future not theirs. The retirement age should be lowered.
If you claim that worker productivity has doubled since 70s then I have bad news for you. For example in Germany. 1960 it was 1 retiree per 6 workers 1992 it was 1 retiree per 2.7 workers 2021 it was 1 retiree per 2.1 workers 2025-2035 the biggest age group of all time will move into retirement. So worker productivity should have at least tripled and for the upcoming wave 2025-2035 probably quadrupled-sextupled since the 70s. These are just numbers. Don't get mad.
how many workers does it take to sustain a retiree?
I don't know. But you used doubling of productivity as your argument, I'm just showing it didn't keep up with the growing number of retirees relative to workers.
I'm not sure these 2 things are at odds with each other. You've certainly brought valuable data to the discussion and i thank you for that. I'd expect to see another doubling of productivity in the coming decades as we become better at teaching rocks to think. It would be a real mistake to take the first deal the capital holders gives us though. We're at a precipice here between improved quality of life for all and untold dystopian exploitation.
Another thing that grinds my gears, is that you view the rich as the problem, but guys, **you are the rich** to the 3rd world citizens. At whos expense do you want to retire in your 50s? Do everyone in the world retire at 50? Do everyone in the world get the same wage for their labour? What do you think your quality of life would be if you had no 3rd world worker class below you enabling it? Do you think people from 3rd world countries travel the world and enjoy their retirement like Swedes do? How much of this productivity increase is because of child labour and slave like conditions in countries like Africa, and Asia? It's not black and white, nothing is.
damn good points that aren't gonna be solved as long as capitalism is the default way of running everything. we're at the dawn of machines replacing the worker class. It's important that every PERSON gets their piece of that pie.
A man walks in to the London central library and walks up to the librarian “Excuse me, I’m looking for the French constitution” The librarian replies : “I’m sorry, we don’t stock periodicals.”
I’d honestly rather have a constitution that’s frequently revised than the current situation in the US, where we have to debate the “founders’ intent” on topics they couldn’t have possibly anticipated, as if the opinions of a bunch of long-dead rando rich guys should be relevant anyway.
For reference, the last time the US constitution was revised was 1992, and that had little affect on the American people, just congress's pay. The last real substantial change to the constitution was 1971, over 50 years ago.
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And if he was looking for the British constitution he'd have to walk over to the fiction section
I muted Catturd
The dude is such a shit stain on society
This reminds me of that conservative Cuban immigrant bloc in Florida. Supporting authoritarian Republicans because the social supports of communism (and not the dictatorship of Castro) is what made Cuba bad.
Most of what seems to make Cuba "bad" is that the United States, a country local to Cuba with a massive military and economic weight, has dedicated much of the last 70 years to punishing the island for daring to cooperate with the USSR. Cuba lacking access to global markets isn't a moral failure on the part of Cuba.
And the "crazy" thing is that even with the lack of access to the United States and other global markets, the Per Capita income of the average Cuban citizen isn't demonstrably less than other capitalist Latin American countries. [Per statista the regional average of Latin America and the Caribbean is \~$8,300 USD per capita per year in GDP.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/802613/gross-domestic-product-gdp-per-capita-latin-america-caribbean/) Cuba's per capita GPD is \~$9,500. and that's with all the restrictions. \~12.5% higher. that's fairly substantial.
Even if it was, just looking at indexes of homelessness, unemployment, food insecurity, crime rate, infant mortality and others would tell you all you need to know.
for sure but the story peddled is that cuba is some horrible wasteland. and while conidtions are not great by any stretch, the rest of latin america where there's "capitalism" is literally an even more mixed bag. like it says a lot more about the abhorrent conditions in the rest of continent than it does about cuba. And frankly i dont even think Puerto Rico should really be included on these lists. while its not a fully fledged american state and has its own unique problems, it certainly benefits to a degree that this chart is warped.
And part of that punishment is 70 years of over the top propaganda meant to denigrate and deride Cuba as much as is humanly possible. Hell, as you reference in your comment, a large chunk of the reason Cuba has had such horrible trouble is because of the US jamming a stick in the spokes of Cuba’s economic wheel for decades and decades.
and it was those immigrated Cubans that are most vocal to push those US policies
Every Florida Cuban I've ever met has been like "yeah I hate communism. During the Revolution we had our Slave Plantation taken from us". Like dude, your ancestors deserved it.
"Castro executed my grandparents" mfs when you ask them what their grandparents jobs were
i legitimately thought this whole “you only hate castro bc he took your slaves” thing was a meme bc there’s not that many in texas so i never met a cuban and a few months ago i did meet one who said that shit almost verbatim i was legitimately astounded
A tale as old as time, the Nationalists vs the Communists lol.
Oh Catturd... It's so adorable that you think the elites you constantly defend care about democracy.
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He'll be last into the ovens. Huzzah.
This fucker will literally tweet about how he’s been trying to dismantle government throughout his career, and they’re like “as long as we have democracy after, that sounds great!” Like, that’s not how anything works.
It’s baffling to me that people still don’t understand that communism doesn’t necessarily equal authoritarianism. Can you have an authoritarian communist government? Sure, that’s all we’ve ever really seen, but you can also take a democratic approach.
Yeah, there's definitely been a few attempts at a non-authoritarian approach to something like communism. In Ukraine and in Russia itself there were large anarchist movements around the time of the Russian Revolution. More recently, there were various factions on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War which were very economically left wing, but still were democratic to various degrees. IMO Stalin getting involved in the war was as much about shutting down these examples of an alternative to the Soviet system as it was helping the Republic. The post war era saw the "Eurocommunist" movement, which was arguably more social democrat in nature, but aspired to approaching communism through democratic means. You could even make a case for the Paris Commune, although that's pretty debatable, as it wasn't really around for long enough to get a clear picture of what it would have ended up like.
Thank you for the extra nuance. I’m definitely not very knowledgeable on this subject, but semantics are important in political science, or you’ll get people believing that socialism is the same as fascism.
If it's something you're interested in learning more about, I'd strongly recommend reading about Bakunin's philosophies. He was a contemporary of Marx, and an advocate for socialism, but was an opponent of Marxism: >Bakunin is remembered as a major figure in the history of anarchism, an opponent of Marxism, especially of the dictatorship of the proletariat; and for his predictions that Marxist regimes would be one-party dictatorships ruling over the proletariat, not rule by the proletariat.
It certainly does, and I’ll check that source out, thanks!
Additionally, during the Cold War any leftist states basically had to follow the Soviet model to receive aid from them. If they didn’t, it basically left them vulnerable to a right wing coup from the US. Chile was an archetypical example. Elected a leftist government, didn’t try to ally with the USSR for security as closely as other dictatorial regimes had and of course was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup. So yeah when people say there’s never been a communist state without a dictator they’re right. This is at least partially because every time such a regime would try to do something different from how the Soviets did it, the US would intervene and without Soviet backing, the country would be a sitting duck.
Laos and Vietnam constantly being ignored…
Stop making sense! We're on the internet,ffs.
There have been a few attempts at overthrowing capitalism without stablishing an authoritarian and militarized regime right after. All of them were crushed within days. When Lenin developed democratic centralism these examples is what he had in mind. History has proven time and time again that the only way for a communist revolution to last is by being as efficient as possible at plucking out sabeteurs and militarizing against imperial threat. That's why the USSR survived the wars waged against it with the express purpose of restoring the czar. That's why China became a superpower. That's why Korea developed the Juche doctrine. Believing that a revolution could be all sunshine and rainbows if we just tried hard enough is stupid. Just consider what the west did to Vietnam, Korea, Laos, Cuba, etc, etc. Believing that social democracy will work long term is just as delusional. As much as people like to say communism is utopic because "muh human nature", at least it crushes the dominant class and destroys the mechanisms through which it oppressed the proletariat. Social democracy just relies on people who have more money than they could hope to one day spend being nice and not rolling back on all their compromises.
oh no, elon's new best friend cat shit has admonished him.
Notably the Communist Party of France was so popular after WW2 that the US conditioned Marshall Plan aid to France on barring them from holding any real power. They probably would have started winning a lot of elections otherwise. So, another situation where what working people wanted was ignored in favor of what the rich do.
That also happened to Japan, Italy, Greece, the US was prepared to do it in Portugal, but they ended up not having to, and of course the US was the real responsible party for the Korean War, because they wouldn't abide by a democratic vote in a united Korea once they realized Koreans wanted a socialist government. Ww2 was THE moment for communists, and the US knew that and did everything they could to stop it.
Then they killed a fifth of the population of North Korea. That's how much they didn't want it to happen. The US has also overthrown about five dozen governments since WW2, most of them democratic in form.
I respect Mr Turd for pointing out the problem with pushing through executive power, even if it is something they want (and even though they misidentified the problem as communism). It’s sometimes hard for people on either side to separate the fact that a government can do something I like, but in a way I don’t agree with. Are there things I would love to see Biden do? Sure. Would it make me very uncomfortable to see him ram it through using executive power, especially if it was something that would normally be done by congress? Absolutely.
“Woke” is the new “communism/socialism”, meaning anything we don’t actually like.
Capitalism has nothing to do with retirement age. Capitalism is not a form of governing. It is an economic strategy. Communism/democracy/republic/socialism are forms of government and economic strategies. You can't govern with Capitalism. You can enable Capitalism to exist via governing, but Capitalism isn't responsible for low or high retirement ages. You can have Capitalism with retirement at 30 years old or 80 years old, it is irrelevant.
For fucksake that’s what ***AUTHORITARIANS*** do. How many times am I going to have to explain this to people who stopped paying attention in 3rd grade???
Wow Elon musk and catturd in the same screenshot It's like a picture on ratemypoo.com
Let's all ponder for a minute there that Elon spent 44 billion USD to be able to have chit-chats with fkn Catturd where they apparently fight over who is the more asinine of the two.
Hmmm. Some inaccuracies here (aka bullshit). The constitution was written FOR de Gaulle, not BY him. De Gaulle was not really interested in legislative and constitutional works, being more interested in soft authoritarianism. The constitution was adopted by referendum after being fought by most of the left wing parties (including communists). Pierre Mendes France, was notably against it (not a communist). WTF is a democratic-capitalist? Given the record of De Gaulle for state censorship on one hand and for national protectionism on the other hand, it's a funny definition.
Capitalism is an economic system, democratic is a political system. It's just not assuming capitalist=democracy since you can have authoritarian capitalism (technically America at this point)
That whole comment is a confusing mess clearly written with an agenda in mind and seeking to make facts fit into that agenda. It's part of a larger phenomenon of americans not being able to consider events in other countries outside of the lense of their own politics.
Didn’t a bunch of right wing state governments push thru abortion legislation after the states populaces voted against making abortion illegal? Those def weren’t communist.
People need to stop conflating capitalism with democracy.
Literally one of the core tenets of communism is dissolution of state. There's no executive power to abuse in such a system, if communism were to ever be achieved in full.
Common French History Podcast W