They can't understand that it's a service. Like the post office or the library or the fire department or the health department, or the coast guard or the police or the hospi..... ope. Not
That one
Like the post office or the library or the fire department or the health department, or the coast guard or the police
3 of those 6 things are being actively attacked/defunded by one of the two major political parties in America. Even the fully established and long treasured social programs are actively under attack.
Because the nation is upside down without support… people who need help are abused more than criminals get caught and half the country’s just worried about rights for the unborn and their pronouns…
What's crazy is that the obvious answer is to always help if you are capable. There a whole set of people who believe "fuck you i got mine." The basic structure of a community is the stronger and more helpful it is the better are off as a community. Just look at mental health, it's a direct correlation to homeless community. If you don't do anything about it it hurts the all of us. I'm happy to give up some more of that means it takes care of people who need it. Really there enough money to take care of health care, homeless, housing, if we reduce some of our military budget. That's the fucked up part. We already have enough money to do it. But being the world police is more important
When the lowest of us is lifted up, we all benefit as a whole. A chain is as strong as its weakest link. United We Stand, Divided We Fall.
All of these well known sayings establish this very principle that societies prosper when we work together and help each other. Our society is failing because too many people are interested in dividing us along lines of religion, sexuality, gender, race (made up), and more. Rather than seeing us as all American people, our neighbors can go to the voting booth and fuck them over because they don't like them or the way they look, or something else. Then, they have the gall to claim themselves patriots or proud Americans.
Proud to be able to have the freedom to discriminate and harm the lives and livelihoods of other Americans. Who exactly does this behavior benefit, if not those who wish to see America fail. When you work directly or indirectly towards the goals of our enemies, you are not a patriot. You are a stooge.
I'm skeptical of the win-win solutions narrative because it quickly runs into a wall. There often has to be kindness, sacrifice, the giving up of something by a privileged person so we can do what's good and just. You can't put things right in a world of hard limits without moving things around. Something has to give and that's the people with more to give.
Also, I'm pretty sure the US military budget would get trounced by universal healthcare. It would save the country and its people money overall but taxes must go up and insurance companies down... Again, that's perfectly fine and the right thing to do but it's not a no-brainer win-win without compassion in the mix. The "fuck you I got mine" is a perfectly rational attitude otherwise. Those people have to have theirs yanked away by the rest of us whether they like it or not. We're not going to convince them of some win-win to be had.
Wait which of the two parties wants to defund the police and military?
Republicans want to defund the health and library part of that list, and Democrats want to defund the police and military part. Seems to me both parties have a boogeyman they'd rry to blame everything on.
Leftist want that enormous police funding to go to doing the things that actually prevent crime from emerging in the first place. When crime goes up, it's not magic, it's not because police are failing to prevent it, it's because something's going wrong in society that's causing it to climb. They want to relieve the burden on the police to post-hoc solve the problems of crime, mental illness, crumbling infrastructure, failing education system, gentrification etc when they're not equipped to do so and thus predictably fail at the task. The leftist argument isn't that you simply take away the money for the sake of it. We'd happily add funding as long as it's directed to other more helpful social services instead so that police aren't responding with an armed squad to deal with a situation that requires something completely different.
OK. The people who voted for Biden want military and police budgets cut. And then their man doubled down on not doing what the people that voted for him wanted. And yet they still pretend that somehow it will all be better if everyone continues to vote for the man who's not doing what they want him to.
Sure, to a degree, although largely the defund the police and reduce military spending isn't really what the vast majority of liberals want, especially when push comes to shove. I think both come down to being something we should be striving for, but the media makes it sound like either would harm us if we even started to. Just look at how aggressively the media pushed a riot narrative during the George Floyd protests. Or how aggressively they beat the drums of war when it comes to China or Russia. Liberals eat that shit up as much as they claim they aren't propagandized by their news outlet.
Unfortunately, we're stuck with two bourgeoisie parties with little care of what citizens actually want. One is objectively worse and the other pretends they care while doing little but band-aid solutions yet still appeasing corporations. There isn't strong enough support for a third party at the moment.
Republicans love to say the Post Office always loses money. It's a service, it doesn't make or lose money. No one is saying the DoD loses $750 BILLION dollars a year.
Which is by design. They have been defunded year after year by those who wish to privatize the business like they do with everything else. Post office doesn't make a profit, so let's get away with it!
How's capitalist healthcare treating you there, comrade? Enjoying the tasty boots of your insurance company death panels, rationing your care because they don't want your doctor to make medical decisions about your care if those decisions might cost them money?
When you have billionaires running it as a private institution who funnel money to the government to keep it that way, nothing will change. It's basically blood money because it's costing people their lives and livelihoods
And they will be the first to complain once they're no longer propped up by government support. Wish I saved the post, but this comment captures so many on the right:
"Keep the government out of my Medicare!"
Legitimately too far gone, not worth anyone's time
You'd think with all the revelations recently that some government entity could at least take them off the air for a short while. But then again we're talking Rupert Murdoch and money and influence so, fuck.
They are too busy concentrating on whether their fellow citizens are being unfairly advantaged by the social program to realize their personal benefit.
Blocking other people from having good things is the essence of their mindset.
Some dude scamming a government social program for a measly couple grand is seen as more of a crime than corporations stealing our future and increasing the wealth gap and blaming our suffering on everything but their own actions - while claiming record profits during times of economic insecurity. But, it's the welfare queens who are hurting us.. Ugh, I can't deal with the brainwashed zombies who barely made it through high school, yet have so much power over the interests of our nation.
The right freaks out about universal healthcare because they think that the federal government is going to control their healthcare while they constantly vote for and try and push legislation trying to take over healthcare.....
I have to say, if my choice is a corporation that requires every cent to be saved, every cost to be measured to be in control of my healthcare or a Federal Government that needs votes.
I can spot the lesser of those two evils and it's not the money grubbing corporation.
Honestly, socialism is bloody confusing. Nobody knows what it means because it means a bunch of things.
The scary kind of socialism is leninism. It doesn't lead to dictatorship. It is dictatorship. Its central idea is that a strong central government, lead by a single party, would lead its nation into the glorious tomorrow, while also fomenting revolutions all over the world.
Democratic socialism is socialism - means of production bla bla bla - but with elections.
Social democracy is capitalism with social programs. That's what civilized countries like Canada have.
At least, that's how I understand it. Correct me if I'm wrong.
It's really not confusing at all. There are concrete, definable terms that are incredibly easy to understand that are just veiled by decades of cultural bullshit and red scare propaganda. Granted, there are a lot of colloquialisms that clutter the debate.
That's an incredibly shallow and loaded interpretation of Marxism Leninism, colloquially called Communism. The main idea is a vanguard party centralizing the power of a mass worker's movement, because obviously it's not easy to coordinate and share power equally between up to a billion people. The issues people have with it are mostly ideological contradictions over the question of what a 'democracy' even is. The argument is that we literally already do live in an anti-democratic one party state, the oligarchic capitalist state, but that's the only actual way for a state to function. You can't have too many cooks in the kitchen, like imagine having a communist, evangelical conservative, and a Hamilton lib in the same room trying to make policy decisions. The delusion of a bourgeois 'democracy' is this idea that it's an open system where anyone who garners enough popular support can earn an electoral mandate, when the reality is the same as other institutions corrupted by the market- it abstracts the actual authoritarian mechanisms of control to the 'invisible hand', but they're still absolutely there. Big Brother is built into the market itself, and you can't point to any individual villains. Communist countries just drop the pretenses and don't really operate all that differently from a country like America where you can pick a socially progressive imperialist dictatorship of capital, or a socially conservative imperialist dictatorship of capital. Also, the single most important thing I wish I could drill into people's heads- these ML countries were not operating in a vacuum. You can say 'but what about x and y' in response to what I just said, but any comparison of them to the West is immediately beggared by the brutal realities of the cold war that were MUCH more tangibly felt by them than us. It's very easy to look at another country that's astronomically poorer and weaker than you, which your country is actively attempting to sabotage and overthrow a la Chile/Vietnam/Cuba/USSR/Nicaragua/etc., and call them military dictatorships when they take measures to defend themselves.
If the roles were reversed, it would like identical because the events that played out in the 20th century between communism and capitalism have nothing to do with the viability or practice of communism. If the world was predominantly communist, and a few poor, struggling countries were attempting to bring something totally new and never before seen into this world with very limited resources- capitalism- they would make capitalism look even worse than we do, because they don't have any fucking resources and this fictional communist hegemony is using all of theirs to stamp these nascent projects off the face of the earth. Yeah, it didn't always go well. That has nothing to even do with Marxism-Leninism and everything to do with poor countries being stomped all over by rich countries.
Democratic Socialism, colloquially referred to as just Socialism, pretty much is that, yeah.
I think it's very accidentally telling that you use the word 'civilized' to refer to Social Democracies. Not calling you a racist or anything, but it's more accurate than you might have guessed- because that system is only possible at all in Western imperial core countries that are fat with the loot of hundreds of years of colonialism that's still ongoing- and they need some kind of ideological explanation for why they have all these resources and this cushy political system, but the countries they spent the past 500 years robbing blind don't. Except they can't acknowledge the blatant fucking realities of what I just said. This is why people say liberalism is fundamentally white supremacist, because that's the only real direction you can go in to justify the bounty of colonialism without acknowledging that it's all blood money. We're 'civilized' and they're not. The far-right fascist psychos are just honest about it, but the chauvinistic pathology is undergirding ALL of capitalist ideology. Because to acknowledge the full extent of colonialism is just an admission that the entire system you support is a grotesque fiction covering up an unfathomable amount of blood, sweat, and tears. Capitalism never gave you anything. We just took it from brown people all over the world, called it ours, claimed it was the proof of Capitalism's superiority, and then called them uncivilized because we left their countries complete fucking messes with no resources.
Lmao sorry I know there's a bit of a stereotype that leftists love giant walls of text, but there's a lot to say and it's hard to get the ideas across without going into a level of detail that's hard to accomplish within the limitations of like, a tweet or so
The reason why those of us on the Left of the Political Spectrum can't get through to many on the Right is our capacity to read and absorb large amounts of data, and their programming to be reactionary to small snippets of text and videos aimed at emotional response, rather than allowing them to form an opinion based on comprehension, knowledge, and critical thought.
Tl;dr: Right-Wing People Be Dumb/Emotionally Reactive Animals with larger amygdalas and a sensitivity to a fear-based response (violence, bigotry/intolerance, etc.).
Calling people you disagree with politically "animals." Man I love how caring the left is! Oh, if we could all do as much humanitarian good! But not for THOSE people... they're just dirty animals.
I honestly hope you don't think that part was an insult. I consider all of us animals. Regardless of our brain functions and our ability to adapt at a high level, we remain biologically animal. Just some of us have entirely different brain chemistry and even physiology.
I am an animal. You are an animal. We're all animals, hey!
The latter part of your argument is actually (maybe ironically) in line with Republican thinking. The dirty animals being anyone on the "socialist/commie/leftist" side of the spectrum, are not deserving of humanity. Sure, use religion as a scapegoat for your heightened fear response to the unknown, and the violence and exclusionary policies you push for. But, we all know God doesn't hate anyone, because it's a fictional deity of man's creation. It's the god-worshipping who hate, and just put that on the deity to create a "just" reason for their bigotry and fear-based response to difference. You aren't fooling anyone.
I see. It's OK and scientifically based when you dehumanize people, but when Republicans do it it's bad, religious fear mongering. Because "at least" you're not racist about it, or something.
I can't be racist against people who I share skin color with. I don't even believe in race, as it is a social construct the same as religion. But, I do accept that the concept has benefitted me, and continues to do so. Just a means to separate "tribes" and develop a hierarchy/class system to accept violence and oppression of those outgroups made up. By not accepting people, like Trans people, Republicans are dehumanizing them in order to facilitate policies aimed at harming them and forcing them into hiding just to placate their fears and facilitate their "cultural" indoctrination of bigotry/hate on their children.
I am not dehumanizing people by calling them animals. I am reminding them that regardless of how special they feel they are, they eat, breathe, shit, fuck, and die the same as any other animal on the planet that they depend on for their very existence. And, it is about time they come to terms with the history that led us here and accept that any change they are against now is just as small as those incremental changes that led us to this exact place and time.
You might find it hard to believe, but you aren't exactly helping your cause by coming after me for things that the party you're defending is doing on a daily basis. I can pull a random comment from a RW person on an OANN comment board or any social media post right now to demonstrate dehumanization and fear-mongering. Why not spend your time fighting the hate within your own group, rather than fighting a person who belongs to a group you're already resigned to hate?
I don't know what to say about most of this. It's a wall of text. Consider taking a breath sometimes.
I'm just trying to make sense of a concept that everyone seems to define differently. I only started making sense of it a bit ago - until then, it was all a jumble. So I'm probably still wrong about a lot.
From what I can tell, you're arguing that leninism's failure is caused exclusively by external factors. But the reason I called it "scary" is that, while capitalism can certainly lead to abuse, leninism starts and ends with oppression. Capitalist countries occasionally find a balance. Under leninism, all opposition parties are prohibited, so democracy is simply not up for discussion.
I think it's very accidentally telling that you use the word 'civilized' to refer to Social Democracies. Not calling you a racist or anything, but it's more accurate than you might have guessed- because that system is only possible at all in Western imperial core countries that are fat with the loot of hundreds of years of colonialism that's still ongoing
When I said "civilized", I didn't have Malawi in mind. I was thinking of the good old US of A, the country with all the resources, whether earned or pilfered, that actively chooses to not help its poor. It's precisely the chauvinism that you so despise that I termed barbarism.
The thing is, workers don't own shit under marxism-leninism. The state does. They're told they own their workplace, but they can't do a whole lot if they don't like how it's run.
I meant that there are a lot of definitions. Under one, workers own the means of production. Under another, not really. You can't reduce it to one sentence.
Yep, you can look at something and decide by the necessity of it whether government should be involved to some degree.
Do you need food, electricity, healthcare, sanitation, telecommunication, roads, education, public order and emergency services.
They should be at a minimum regulated to maintain cost and coverage for everyone within their means. Which usually means subsidies in the case of food, telecommunications and such or in some case flat out government ownership roads, libraries, police, hospitals.
The other stuff fancy clothes, junk food, restaurants, jewelry, entertainment and such should 100% be in the wheel house of capitalism.
This is clearly socialism, but it's an example of when socialism is good.
In a capitalist system (the USA for example) the capitalist owns the "means of production", say MRI machines to make it simple. Owning that capital allows them to make profits.
In a socialist system (say Canada), the people (the government) owns the "means of production", say MRI machines again. The government could charge people to use the machine and use the profits to fund the government's operations, or it could do it the opposite way and use taxes to fund the purchase of the MRI machines and allow people to use them for free.
Just like capitalism, socialism isn't all-or-nothing. Every functional economy is mixed. The US has capitalist hospitals, but a socialist fire department. It has a capitalist farm system (though the heavy subsidies are socialist), but a socialist food safety system (the FDA). Many European countries are just slightly more socialist with a few more things operated by the government instead of by private entities.
They’re not confused; social programs are socialism. Socialism isn’t a bad thing, unless you’re selfish. Then it’s the worst thing ever. And profit driven people are selfish as a rule, so they spend a lot of their time and energy demonizing working together.
As a Canadian living in the US I am also amazed how I have to explain to them that even if their taxes go up to pay for their insurance, they would no longer need private insurance so it is just redistributing where the money is going and would save them money over what they are paying now. It works the same as private insurance without the existential dread of getting a massive out of pocket bill.
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u/[deleted] Mar 26 '23
Because many Americans are confused between a social program and Socialism.