NATO sent a bunch of weapons to Ukraine and now wants to see some PR return on that investment. Meanwhile, we’re now seeing admissions in western media that Ukraine was forced into offensive with insufficient weapons and training:
When Ukraine launched its big counteroffensive this spring, Western military officials knew Kyiv didn’t have all the training or weapons—from shells to warplanes—that it needed to dislodge Russian forces. But they hoped Ukrainian courage and resourcefulness would carry the day.
L take, communism and socialism don’t work and never will. There’s a reason every communist or socialist country has failed or fallen back into capitalism for the masses and authoritarianism for the top.
“During the years of Stalin’s reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women’s rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that “socialism doesn’t work” is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.” Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
Got a friend that works at AmBev. Was telling me their profits went up because most the people outraged over the whole Bud Light thing just switched to other, more expensive AmBev brands. Yknow, because they're fucking idiots too angry to even check who owns the brand they drink.
What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I have a PhD in online arguments, and I’ve been involved in numerous anonymous arguments with internet strangers, and I have won over 300 arguments online.
Note, the idea doesn’t support the idea of carry permits. Personally, dont have an issue with a hunting rifle or shotgun kept in a safe at home, but carry and especially cc permits are absolutely insane. You do not need a firearm that can be hidden for either home defence or hunting.
Colt didn’t call it the great equalizer for nothing. Imagine being a 90 lb woman facing rape or death by a 200 lb man. Don’t think for a second anything but a gun will allow her to save herself.
The following are the twelve points that guide Mr. Norris' life:
I will develop myself to the maximum of my potential in all ways.
I will forget the mistakes of the past and press on to greater achievements.
I will always be in a positive frame of mind and convey this feeling to every person that I meet.
I will continually work at developing love, happiness and loyalty in my family and acknowledge that no other success can compensate for failure in the home.
I will look for the good in all people and make them feel worthwhile.
If I have nothing good to say about a person, I will say nothing.
I will give so much time to the improvement of myself that I will have no time to criticize others.
I will always be as enthusiastic about the success of others as I am about my own.
I will maintain an attitude of open-mindedness toward another person’s viewpoint while still holding fast to that which I know to be true and honest.
I will maintain respect for those in authority and demonstrate this respect at all times.
I will always remain loyal to God, my country, family and my friends.
I will remain highly goal-oriented throughout my life because that positive attitude helps my family, my country, and myself.
How’s about a website that generates money, like Facebook or YouTube? Can you own that?
What about products that designed to create ongoing streams of revenue, like a patent on an invention or a piece of art you can collect royalties from every time it is displayed? The USSR famously took ownership of Tetris away from its creator.
Under communism, how does the stock market work? I’m not a big fan of it, but it’s pretty hard to imagine getting rid of it now that the global economy is pretty much dependent on it.
Today, five countries exist that can be said to be communist: China, Russia, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba. Of those five, none have achieved actual communism, and several have inarguably embraced capitalism to a great extent. All of them have essentially authoritarian governments. Which is unsurprising, since a dictatorship of the proletariat is central to the Marxist vision of how to create a communist society, and involves the creation of a single-party transitional government that forcibly suppresses all its critics and rivals.
I’m not big into capitalism and I think we should implement plenty of socialist reforms, but I will never understand why some people on the Left—or anyone for that matter—think communism is what we should be striving for.
“Today, five countries exist that can be said to be communist: China, Russia”
Tell me you have no idea what you are talking about without directly telling me you have no idea what you are talking about. In what way can today’s Russia “be said to be communist”, and how does its current, very explicitly anti-communist government, contribute to the point you are making?
The funny thing: both memes are true… We live in a fkin disgusting world where every system oppresses. People who think capitalism works for the people are equally braindead as the ones claiming China and Russia are communist utopias.
Sure Marxist communism could be great, but it yet has to be archived
Nobody thinks that Russia is communist. However, whatever you want to call China, it’s objectively better than what we have in the west. One thing to note though is that 87.6% of young Chinese identify with Marxism, and the Communist party has 95 million members.
China lifted 800 million out of poverty, and in fact China is the only place in a world where any meaningful poverty reduction is happening. If we take China out of the equation poverty actually increased in real terms:
90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans.
Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. People in China also enjoy high social mobility.
Unsurprisingly, government satisfaction in China is extremely high and unmatched by any western democracy:
Numerous studies and surveys also show that people who actually live in China feel their country is democratic in a sense of having a government that works in the interest of the majority. In fact, far higher percentage of people living in China feel their system is democratic than those living in US
Finally, China is the only major country that’s actually doing anything meaningful to transition off fossil fuels. Once again, making absolutely stunning progress this year alone.
So, yeah, China might not be an utopia, and they have plenty of problems. However, it is a country where life continues to improve with each and every decade, that doesn’t suffer from constant economic crashes the way capitalist shitholes do, and where people are happy and optimistic about the future. Seems like looking at what China is doing and learning from that might be a good start for people in the west.
It’s also fascinating to me how the same people who like to do purity tests for China claiming they’re not actually communist are also the ones who’ll defend places like US or Canada saying yeah it’s not perfect, but it’s the ideal of the system that matters.
It’s such an incredible example of cognitive dissonance. People able to recognize that their own system doesn’t live up to the ideal they have in their heads, but still treat it as a valid interpretation of the idea, but when it comes to a system they dislike then the same logic doesn’t apply all of a sudden.
i think your projecting something here or making a deliberate strawman, read my first sentence again and tell me where I am “able to recognize that [my] own system doesn’t live up to the ideal [i] have in [my] heads, but still treat it as a valid interpretation of the idea, but when it comes to a system [i] dislike then the same logic doesn’t apply all of a sudden.”
Nobody is projecting anything here or making ant strawman. You made a false equivalence claiming that both US and China are bad. I gave you concrete examples of China continuously improving lives of its people, and being pretty much the only place in the world where major quality of life improvements are happening for the majority. If you can’t understand that, then what else is there to tell you.
Do you think China is a Marxist utopia? Because if not I don’t know why you are so butthurt by my comment, if yes my point stands.
Not sure what you are trying to proof here, to me it seems like you have two simple categories in your head: “pro me” and “anti me” and you assume everyone in the same category must be the same. I remotely mention that I don’t think China is heaven on earth and you start to talk about how I must be mentally derailed or something.
I think calling the us democratic is far fetched, butcallingg China democratic is not very close to the truth either.
Nah I don’t think China is an utopia. I just think it’s far better than what US offers. If you can’t understand that one thing can be better than the other without either being some sort of an utopia, what else is there to say.
“People who think China is a communist utopia are idiots”
And
“There is NO good aspekt of China AT ALL”
Are two different sentences and you don’t need to start calling me mentally derailed or make site long fanboy essays about China, what else there is to say?
It’s such an incredible example of cognitive dissonance. People able to recognize that their own system doesn’t live up to the ideal they have in their heads, but still treat it as a valid interpretation of the idea, but when it comes to a system they dislike then the same logic doesn’t apply all of a sudden.
As is said, it seems like you are working with only two categories in your head: “pro China” and “pro us”
That one can criticise one of them without liking the other doesn’t seem to fit in your head
Yeah that’s me, and being able to recognize that one system is a better option than the other has nothing to do with the straw man you keep making. It seems like you’re having a really hard time wrapping your head around the concept that one thing can be preferable to another without either being perfect.
Yeah, please give up on pretending you were trying to reason. What you were doing was making a transparent straw man and ignoring what I told you. That’s just lazy trolling.
You could have a personal garden, but to have a farm you’d have to obtain a lot of land. Then you’d have to make the land productive with either large and resource hungry machinery i.e. capital or you’d have to obtain and exploit the labor of farm workers to work by hand.
What if i agree with some of my friends that we will join our yards to make one big field and work it together? We could also ask others for help and pay them for their work, the amount of money we both agree with.
but if some of my friends dont want to work it they can just sell me the land. And if we produce more food than we need we can sell it so we can buy other things we don’t produce. I dont understand why its wrong to own a farm.
Once you start to accumulate surplus property then its very obviously not personal anymore. A person that doesn’t want a garden won’t have one to sell you, because they wouldn’t have one in the first place.
Don’t think in terms of “right” and “wrong”. Think materially.
10 acres is very very small and is not even a full time job for a person. Are you assuming this is all done without machines? like small hobby farms are all Amish or something? (actually even the Amish farm way more then 10 acres per person, they are not lazy)
(EDITING TO ADD THIS IS WRONG AND I MESSED UP THE CALCULATIONS. IT SHOULD BE 40 TIMES OR SO MORE)
Also just because this bugs me in a strange way.
10 acres of land growing wheat produces about 600lbs of harvested wheat a year. That is about 900,000 calories a year. Even of you ate nothing but wheat gruel you would just manage enough food for one person (about 900,000 calories assuming 2500 a day).
I think like a lot of people you have no idea the scale of farming required to feed the world. Is this why Holodomors happen?
Yes. But don’t worry, one of them just assured me that communist countries “never make the same mistakes as their predecessors,” so if we starve it’ll be slightly different than the holodomor or killing all the sparrows, so we got that going for us.
Also the holodomor was totally an accident and not malicious or abject stupidity, just a goof-em-up!
I’m glad you answered in their stead. Obviously you’re the kind of person to steel man arguments to truly show their weaknesses and strengths. You’d never regurgitate boiler plate talking points from people opposed to the ideology.
Never look up how many famines have been overseen by capitalist countries btw. It’d make your comparison lack any meaningful difference. India was run by the east India trading company when they had the bengal famine after all. And don’t forget how the Irish “potato” famine happened. (The British made it a crime to keep any non potato crop for themselves).
“Yes that happened, and it was bad. We shouldn’t repeat those mistakes, though we do not have to abandon capitalism entirely.”
It’s a little different than “nuh uh, real capitalism has never been tried that was imperialism/colonialism. Real capitalism is only when everything is perfect forever under free market capitalism so if anything bad happens it was never real.”
Actually I bring this up because when talking about famines people love to downplay the strife caused by capitalists maximizing profit and socializing loses.
Ironically your last paragraph is a pretty accurate paraphrasing of the usual dialogue around capitalisms faults.
I don’t think most communists would have a problem with people trading crops that they grow themselves. The problem comes in when someone hires employees to grow more crops for them, starts collecting profits, and grows the farm even bigger. All under the expectation that they own everything that their employees worked for. Cause that’s literally capitalism on a small scale.
Of course it needs to be possible for multiple people to come together and start growing crops, but only as long as no single person can take over the entire operation. Leaders would be elected, and be given a somewhat higher salary to reflect the additional responsibility.
Its not an as hominem attack kid ^^ Ad hominem would be: you are an idiot and therefore wrong. What he says is “you write wrong stuff and are therfore an idiot”
So, you’re saying that the Global South (either Africa or South America) has made major, concerted attempts at creating effective capitalist states?
There’s a few examples. Australia, of course, though Leftists will obviously discount it.
Chile very deliberately adopted capitalism, though it was under an oppressive dictator. Even so, it’s #3 on the list of South American countries for per-capita GDP these days, and is topping the list for political freedoms.
Uruguay, with it’s famously beige recent politics, is #1.
Of course, you have Indonesia, which has been doing pretty well recently. I wonder why? (/s)
Malaysia and Singapore are technically in the northern hemisphere, so they don’t count I guess…
Most of South America has historically swung radically back and forth between left and right (yes, in part due to US pressure). There’s a leftward swing again. Let’s see how it goes this time! Good news is that if it fails, they can just blame external forces yet again.
and now your making a strawman argument. do you try to play some sort of bogus-argument-bingo?
What is said was: “what a did was not an ad hominem atack”
now your comment starts with: “So, you’re saying that the Global South (either Africa or South America) has made major, concerted attempts at creating effective capitalist states?”
and you even dare to start with: "so what your saying is … "
no thats not at all what i said, i didnt mention the globale south, i didnt metion capitalism, i didnt even agree with OP on his meme.
but thats what you argue against. Do you really not see this or are you a troll?
Well this is a blast from the past. I can’t even load the context anymore.
I was engaged in an argument, and staying focused on the argument instead of getting sidetracked by semantics. But anyway, you claimed “it’s not ad hominem, he said you were wrong therefore you are stupid!” That rests on the assumption that I was wrong, so I was assuming that was your assertion.
I think. This was, after all, months ago, and apparently the account I was arguing with got deleted or something?
It would be an ad hominem Argument if he would take your personality/looks/person as an argument against your talking point/what you say.
This is not the case here. He argues against your talking point/what you say and uses that as an argument against your person.
It doesn’t matter what side of you both is right content wise, its not ad hominem either way, as you botth argue about the information itself. (Plus making [unnessesary] assumptions about each others personality based on the opinion they have in the information)
As homin is ONLY if you use the person saying the opinion against the opinion.
If you use the opinion the person says as an argument against the person, that something totally different and quite logic frankly.
For example: If trump says: poc are violent
Ad hominem would be: this is wrong BECAUSE trump said it.
Normal arguing is: trump is saying this, therefore he is a racist/dumb/wrong.
Two very different things.
And atacking others for caring two much about semantics when you make false (semantic) allegations is another sign of bad discussion style IMHO
I have no hard feelings about this thread, but it bothers me when people are discussing in awaty that is bound to fail, so I wanted to clarify this
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