• wurzelgummidge@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    I can’t remember where I copied this from originally but it seems pertinent here

    Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. they know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism.’

    Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions.

    This is is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores.

    An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete.

    They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone too irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover).

    One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services.

    But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy.

  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    Don’t make me laugh, it’s not socialism! it’s bro-ism, 'cause, I got you bro. If everyone got their bros and we all bros then we can do absolutely anything bro!

      • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        You don’t get, socialism doesn’t exist, it can’t hurt you, it was just a boogeyman created by the billionaires so you’ll go back to the wagie cage. There’s only bro-ism

        • blade_barrier@lemmy.mlBanned
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          4 months ago

          I live in a post soviet country so I experience the impact of socialism to this very day. It’s appalling.

          • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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            4 months ago

            You experience our destruction, we stole the world from you are we’re coming for seconds. Let us in more, let us finacialze you, your dreams will have advertising in them, we will strip whatever is left of your public transporter for copper, we will put your nana in the streets after converting her house into empty condos and stealing her pension. This is what happens when you let to imperial powers come in and loot your dwellings.

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      Yep, this is the concept behind “Social Democracy.” Class collaborationism is a myth used to justify the perpetuation of Capitalism, not ending it.

      • blade_barrier@lemmy.mlBanned
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        4 months ago

        Lisa is trying to sell socialism to people under the pretext of “all people work together”, greater good for all mankind and other fairytales. She’s just feeding them propaganda. Fuck Lisa.

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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          4 months ago

          Socialism is certainly the necessary path forward, I don’t think that amounts to just “feeding people propaganda.”

          • blade_barrier@lemmy.mlBanned
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            4 months ago

            There’s no path forward. We are not moving forward. That’s just socialist progressivist belief. Some believe in Buddha, some believe in Allah, socialists believe in path forward.

            And OF COURSE socialism is the only path forward according to socialism. Who would’ve thought.

            • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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              4 months ago

              “Forward” as in progressing in complexity of production and improving key quality of life metrics.

              My name is not “Socialism,” Socialism is not a living, breathing being either.

              • blade_barrier@lemmy.mlBanned
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                4 months ago

                What’s a complexity of production? Why do we want to progress in complexity of production? Shouldn’t we be trying to reduce complexity? And who defines the “key quality of life metrics”? If socialists define those, then surely socialism is necessary to improve those metrics. But I guess different people can have different metrics. Catholic Church, for example, may take the percentage of people going to heaven after death as a key quality of life metric. In this case, socialism would be absolutely devastating for quality of life.

                • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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                  4 months ago

                  You can simplify where you can, but as technology advances it gets more complex to manufacture. You can’t reasonably build a cell phone in your garage from base components.

                  As for quality of life metrics, things like literacy rates and life expectancies, home ownership and mortality rates. The Catholic Church should not determine this as they do not base their beliefs in known material reality.

                  I am fairly certain that you’re a troll, though, so I don’t see much point in continuing this.