Well Ya, the GOP thinks abortion is 100% voluntary. It’s not! The vast majority of abortions are done for medical purposes and very few are done just because the women just doesn’t want to have a baby
But really, it doesn’t matter why. A woman shouldn’t be forced to carry a fetus for the same reason one of those anti-abortion fucknuts would object to being forced to give someone else one of their kidneys.
It hasn’t been put that way to many of them in the Fox News bubble they live in, which is a big part of the problem. They hear “abortion is murder” and don’t think about it further than that.
I agree. It’s pure lunacy to think women in the modern area won’t be able to get abortions when cave women 20,000 years ago figured it out. Yes there will be some, most younger women forced to carry a pregnancy to term. But the majority of abortions will go unreported and the GOP will think it’s a win. Also, women forced to carry usually have less children over their life than if they were allowed to get an optional abortion. The GOPs main argument is that we need more children to support our nation but abortion bans have the exact opposite effect.
I’m not sure what “cave women” (I hate that misconception) 20,000 yeas ago you’re talking about, but abortions outside of medical settings are extremely dangerous, so women getting them some other way or just figuring it out on their own is going to kill many of them.
Once again, I 100% agree with you. It’s the GOP that’s not reading history books. There was a time in our history abortion was nationally banned. Women will get abortions regardless of the legality and personal health risks. Actually after roe v wade was passed we saw a spike in population growth because spoiler alert, dead and unhealthy women due to a dangerous pregnancy have way less children.
Exactly. But lots of anti-abortionists think pregnancy is a punishment for having sex. Ignoring, of course, the fact that the majority of women who get abortions are married.
And not a slap to the wrist. They caused a lot more harm than Joe from the neighborhood who got caught with an ounce of weed before it was legalized, but they get away with it. Again and again.
I’m with the prosecutors. This seems like some rookie journalist is just parroting the stories he’s told by a criminal before trial without providing any evidence. He could have at least talked to some scholars or lawyers or get somebody to agree but it’s really just a story that seems to be made up.
There should be consequences for companies (and specifically the leadership) that cause danger to innocent lives in their pursuit of profit over all else.
What this woman did was a heinous hate crime. But this isn’t the oppression Olympics. There has been a rise in antisemitism too. No need to diminish that in order to assert that hate crimes against Palestinian people is bad.
There is a very systematic and deliberate propaganda effort by many US media, infamously the New York times at the forefront to downplay antimuslim and general racist attacks and overexaggerate feelings of insecurity that do not represent actual danger. As a result of this peaceful campus protests including anti-zionist Jews have been brutally beaten down by the police and fascist mobs. So under the pretense of fighting antisemitism Jews are getting beaten up on campus. But according to the Zionists those are the “wrong kind of Jews” or “self hating Jews” so attacking them is justified in their eyes.
There’s a lot of complexities with different groups downplaying and exadurtating. I won’t deny mass disinformation in today’s politics and current events. But I’m not going to diminish how a group feels about prejduece against them when they have experienced a mass shooting in 2018, 2 targeted deaths in 2023, a firebombing at a synagog in 2023, and more. The ADL, a pretty credible group (apparently not really), reported a significant increase in antisemitic incidents in 2022, before the conflict in Palestine gained attention and the Israeli government started ramping up their propaganda machine. Bottom line, I don’t want to make this some kind of competition, especially on a post where we should be focusing on the abhorrent treatment of this Palestinian child, but antisemitism is a problem too and I don’t think its OK to rug sweep the issues either are facing right now.
The ADL was just decided to be a biased source by Wikipedia as its definition of antisemitism is equating antizionism with antisemitism and they are a pro Israeli lobby group. That is not to say that Antisemitism is not a problem. But it is a problem where the perpetrators like in the Synagogue shooting are primarily white nazis. The same groups that then attacked campus protests speaking up for Palestine. So there is not only a trend to shift the blame to muslims and invent “imported antisemitism” like they call it in Germany, but even an unholy alliance between the classic antisemitic nazis and zionist groups
On the ADL, you’re right. I had historically been under the impression they were credible and haven’t update my information because I was trusting NPR. Thank you. But, my point still stands. 2020 onwards has seen a huge uptick in hate crimes targeted towards Jewish people outside of the ADLs statements. Pew research has also covered the issue: pewresearch.org/…/anti-jewish-harassment-occurred…
I am also against the shift to blame Muslims. I’m only taking issue with trying to diminish the rise in antisemitism.
I’m sorry, but I can’t care about antisemitism while the jews control the media and have heavy involvement in the banking problems in our country. The wealth available to the jewish people is beyond insane. They can choose to do whatever they want. The billions of US dollars flowing into Israel every year thanks to pro zionist lobbying gives Israel the option to do whatever it wants, and it chooses violence. A zionist will say “Not all jews” in exactly the same tone as a men’s rights activist will say “not all men”. It’s the same argument.
I’m viewing this from after the point when American media started caring about what was happening in Gaza; After October 7th. I don’t believe that tensions before then were anywhere close to what they are now. At least, as shown by the media.
So sure, while I’m not going to say those things didn’t happen, they certainly happened before shit hit the fan.
Honestly if telling someone they can’t murder buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo children makes them feel unsafe then I’m proud to make that person feel unsafe.
You gotta wonder WTF the French were thinking when they decided to force people into the sweltering insomnia of 80 degrees indoors at night just for the sake of creating the appearance that climate change is the fault of the dispossessed proletariat running air conditioners to survive global heating, and pretending like the owners of the means of production aren’t actually in a position to change how the economy functions.
I would prefer if you used just “owners” or “owners of the majority of wealth”. Owners of production just sounds like old-school socialism propaganda and doesn’t really translate to the current world.
No, you just don’t understand that “means of production” doesn’t exclusively apply to industrial production, it talks about all capital, including financial. Lenin talks about this extensively as far back as the early 1900s, and it applies extremely well.
Lenin does sound awfully like socialism propaganda. Or more in essence, the desire for egalitarian utopia written by pseudo-philosophers (neither economists, nor engineers, nor mathematicians, nor any based-in-logic scientific field) without having any such social system in place and only dreaming. USSR did not go well, in any way, as an aside.
I can understand the desire for a push for more socialistic government reforms, but what needs to just happen is European semi-capitalism semi-socialism to just be more controlled, especially with regards to tax avoidance, and anti-monopolisation, and then to government mandated climate-change-fighting policies such as heavy (and unavoidable) taxing on pollution.
Looking back into old books and spouting the same-old propagandist battlecries does not do much to the conversation, and actually tries to derail it, instead of simply pointing “yeah that’s bad, maybe they should have done this, I did the math [or maybe this other person <link> did the math]”.
Again, you’re not bringing any remotely new pseudocriticism to the table. Friedrich Engels outlines this in his essay “Socialism: utopian and scientific” from 1880, in which he explains the difference between utopian socialism, and scientific socialism. Your criticism is outdated by 144 years.
pseudo-philosophers (neither economists…
Again, showing us how you haven’t read a single essay or book on Marxism, and all you’re doing is regurgitating anti-communist propaganda. If you think Marxist writers aren’t well-versed in economics, you’re absolutely delirious. Marx is best known for his “Capital”, a 3-volume treaty on economics which is still used to this day in economics faculties. There ARE things wrong within the book such as the understanding of money which Modern Monetary Theory has extensively criticised and improved upon (if you’re interested in the field of economics), but it’s a key work in explaining many of the functionings of economics, being the first work (to my knowledge) to properly describe the process of revalorization of capital and doing a great job at analyzing economics under the light of the industrial revolution. I’m currently reading Lenin’s “Imperialism: the higher stage of capitalism”, and like half the book are references to economists or geographers, most of them non-marxists, showing economic trends in the concentration of capital, in the specifics of the distribution of colonial land among some industrial powers of the world… Even if you’re not a Marxist I suggest you have a look at it, it may change your mind about which degree of science Marxists are using in their analysis, and it’s quite short.
USSR did not go well, in any way, as an aside.
The Russian Empire in 1917 was a backwards, feudal, unindustrialized state incapable of winning a war against a recently industrializing Japan and requiring massive French loans to even attempt to fight it, where the vast majority of the population were quite literally serfs working the land for an aristocracy. If you’re interested in Russian history up until the 1917 revolutions I recommend “The Empire Must Die” by Zygar, a non-marxist writer (in fact very critical of bolshevism) in which he examined an immense amount of documents starting from 1900 and describes the period that led to these revolutions in extremely good detail.
The USSR managed to come out victorious of a 4-year-long civil war in 1921 against the Tsarist loyalists which were aided economically and militarily to the point of Russia being invaded on their behalf by 14 countries including European powers such as England, France, and Italy. By the early 1940s, only 20 years after beginning to industrialize, the Soviets were capable of defeating the industrial powerhouse of Nazi Germany (a country that had begun industrializing around 150 years prior to that). By the 1970s, the USSR had gone from being the feudal state I describe, to being the second power in the world. This is not a defense of everything the USSR did as there was massive oppression during Stalinism, but saying that “the USSR did not go well in any way” is again delirious.
what needs to just happen is European semi-capitalism semi-socialism to just be more controlled, especially with regards to tax avoidance, and anti-monopolisation, and then to government mandated climate-change-fighting policies such as heavy (and unavoidable) taxing on pollution.
I disagree. Capitalism inevitably leads to the concentration of capital and the establishing of monopolies. It’s literally the tendency of markets, since it’s a “winner-takes-it-all” system, in which once a big share of the market is consolidated by the “most competitive” company, economy of scale makes it quite literally impossible for other companies to outcompete it in a free market. The best alternative to a free market isn’t a “regulated free market”, it’s a democratically planned economy which actually goes where the population wants it to, and not where the invisible hand guides it.
“Regulating” companies into stopping their polluting and monopolistic behaviour usually amounts to allowing the companies of other countries to outcompete them (as you can see with the current cries of the EU and the USA against Chinese electric vehicles or solar panels), and that is if the capital-controlled media and elected officials even dare to attempt this in the first place. For a very recent historical example on how capital won’t allow a progressive government, you can read the case of the Spanish political party “Podemos” (I’m bringing it up because I’m well-versed in everything that happened because i happen to be Spanish). Wanting to apply this exact type of regulation to improve workers’ rights and social rights and legislating progressively towards a clean economy, there was a collaboration between private media and the state apparatus, in which a false report of corrupted money from Venezuela to Podemos and its leader Pablo Iglesias was fabricated by a rogue corps inside the National Police, and was leaked to private media. All of this is already confirmed to be true by judges, and again, you can look all of this up. The result was a multi-year campaign of smearing in private media which led to the practically total disappearance of the party, in one of the most flagrant cases of lawfare in a European country in the recent times.
Another Spanish example of capitalism refusing to be regulated is the Second Spanish Republic, in which a democratically elected leftist government in the 30s wanted to regulate for a redistribution of land to peasants to improve on the massive inequality at the time, together with labour protections and workers rights. The result was a fascist coup that sunk the country in a half-decade of civil war, and ultimately placed Francisco Franco as the fascist dictator of the country for the following 35-ish years until his death in the 70s.
The anti-scientific and ahistorical thing isn’t saying that communism can be obtained, but to say that regulations aren’t only possible, but even better. You’re just showing us that you don’t understand the history of class struggle and workers rights movements, which achieved the concessions they achieved in the western world not by electing progressive reformist representatives, but by organizing labor and striking and disrupting until their demands were met.
Again, you’re not bringing any remotely new pseudocriticism to the table. <…> I agree that I am not read up on this topic. My knowledge of Lenin is definitely less than limited. If I read his works I could talk about more in depth about his persona.
From my coarse perspective, given your input, what Engels wrote (which would be even more dated) maybe takes in more perspectives. But then, we weren’t entirely talking about Engels before. Scope broadens.
My very first comment was about your (not entirely hidden) socialistic propaganda style of writing. The points you tried to make in your very first post would likely be valid, but instead they were railing the discussion in a direction of socialistic revolution, because of ACs.
Again, showing us how you haven’t read a single essay or book on Marxism <…> Even if I haven’t read a book, discussing the topic should be viable, otherwise how would those books have been written by esteemed law-practicing philosophers? And in general, the ideas of socialism and capitalism are tremendously interspersed in all literature we read, one can’t live without being subjected to them.
In no way was my response anti-communism propaganda. I just disliked the phrasing which clearly shows your desire to drop the old-school battlecries without a directed objective. (Unless you desire to just include all objectives without second guess, from books, but then be sure to include all).
The general problem I have (which is empirical and not substantiated here) is that Lenin himself, while likely incredibly intelligent, was not, by trade and thus biggest chunk of his time, a mathematician, or an economist, so while he can read the papers, having a fully informed opinion on the matter is a dubious idea.
Reasons why I am so jaded and critical is that many fields these days (especially lacking rigorous peer review) fall victim to innability to discern fact from fiction. Specifically for philosophy, feels like the field has diverged from mathematics and physics in an ununderstandable way, where philosophy tries to be a voice of reason in humanity’s subjective reality of society while ignoring mathematics and pure formal logic. To me this is insane. Especially for a field that was once exactly that: mathematics, physics and trying to understand the natural world. In general, the field has been critiqued for empirically arguing that its education is actually formative for logical thinking 12.
The reasons I am jaded at dated books, is because the way of thinking can be so different, even in physics, many papers from early 20th century have god in the picture or see the human as some kind of special consciousness in the picture of the universe.
The Russian Empire in 1917 was a backwards, feudal <…>
The first paragraph I completely agree.
Nazi Germany was indeed defeated by allied forces. And Russia definitely played a large part in it. However, the way it did, was not due to industrialization. It was due to an insane amount of conscription that is well-known as a meat-grinder. 9 million military dead (versus 4.3 million military from Nazis. Note: Nazis weren’t only fighting USSR.) was not a mark of an industrialized nation cranking out well-prepared, well-rationed, well-equipped soldiers, it was a feudal state throwing meat at the problem (or rather opportunity). Among other atrocities such as forced famine Holodomor.
The time of the cold war, Russia was barely scraping by to keep the narrative of “Great superpower” alive, it was only until Chernobyl, Gorbachev that USSR finally imploded and all was slowly unraveled. If 1970s USSR was this great superpower, then somehow 10 years later it fell to stagnation and then collapse? What? With people coming out from the iron curtain amazed at how simple people in foreign countries had lived, the variety of food, the quality of engineering, of clothes they had.
All the while illegal speculators were a huge problem, and simple food items were “always out of stock” throughout the whole USSR’s life. You just had to know the right people and pay the right money to live normally. That is, after you waited for 3 hours to get bread.
Personally, USSR achieved limited industrialization, while funneling unfathomable amounts of money into shiny things such as space exploration, while people had a hard time getting bread. To me, this is still close to feudalism.
I disagree. Capitalism inevitably leads to the concentration of capital and the establishing of monopolies
Europe has achieved the highest quality of life in the world not by a planned economy, but by mediating the inherent problems of capitalism (monopolism, elitism, class warfare) and complete socialism (government overreach, lack of freedom, lack of democracy). This is what I said is most prudent to continue, but it requires maintenance from strong-willed people.
“Regulating” companies into stopping their polluting and monopolistic behaviour usually amounts to allowing the companies of other countries to outcompete them
That is indeed a central problem, slightly reduced by import taxes. Obviously a full solution should include some international cooperation, and if it isn’t possible (and seems it isn’t) sanctions and heavier import taxes should follow. Or some taxes on import that take into account pollution at the importing source.
I don’t see how your example of corruption is novel. Corruption is indeed something that must be fought, and it wouldn’t disappear in a socialist society, as it didn’t USSR (where you could get anything for favors if you knew the right people).
The 20th century period across Europe was indeed a rough one, many countries went fascist (Spain, Portugal, Russia, briefly: Austria, Greece, Germany, Italy). Still, I don’t think it’s a novel example. And it’s also not an example against the current state of Europe, it’s an example of the inequality and volatility of European countries at the time.
The anti-scientific and ahistorical thing <…> One thing is to talk about history and how we got here, and to talk about what we have now and what do we do. These are separate.
The idea behind representative democracy is that I cannot do the work of a law-maker, deal with tax policy details while also living a life, so I elect someone whom I think I can trust.
If I have no trust in the system, I will go to the streets, as it was always the case. And yes, in this sense, we hold a lot of thankfulness for those that went to the streets before us to bring us to where we are now.
your (not entirely hidden) socialistic propaganda style of writing
I’m not trying to hide anything here. My username is a reference to Lenin, whom I referenced in the comment, doesn’t get much more explicit than that :)
your desire to drop the old-school battlecries without a directed objective
Firstly, I’m not the one who brought up the dispossessed masses, that was another commenter. Secondly, it’s not without a directed objective. The argument is clear: “the fault of climate change is not of the individuals who use AC, but of the system as a whole, and since the system is controlled by the ruling class, the ruling class is to blame”. It explicits this victim-blaming mindset where the general populace is blamed for climate change and pollution, when they’re not the ones choosing in which system they live. And I say this as someone who doens’t own a car out of principle, so criticism to the system is compatible with individual action and compatible with understanding that the blame is not of the individual workers.
The general problem I have (which is empirical and not substantiated here) is that Lenin himself, while likely incredibly intelligent, was not, by trade and thus biggest chunk of his time, a mathematician, or an economist, so while he can read the papers, having a fully informed opinion on the matter is a dubious idea.
I don’t accept this criticism. First of all he was a lawyer, so he definitely had education in economics. Secondly, I don’t believe that formal education in an institution is the only possible way to attain knowledge in a field. I say this as someone doing a PhD in a STEM field, knowing many people around me who have formally attained the same education level as I have and know jackshit, and others who with the same formal degrees as I do, are insanely more knowledgeable. Hell, Marx himself, who wrote one of the most influential and important works on economics of history, formally studied law and philosophy, not economics. How is this not proof enough?
Reasons why I am so jaded and critical is that many fields these days (especially lacking rigorous peer review) fall victim to innability to discern fact from fiction. Specifically for philosophy, feels like the field has diverged from mathematics and physics in an ununderstandable way, where philosophy tries to be a voice of reason in humanity’s subjective reality of society while ignoring mathematics and pure formal logic. To me this is insane. Especially for a field that was once exactly that: mathematics, physics and trying to understand the natural world. In general, the field has been critiqued for empirically arguing that its education is actually formative for logical thinking
All of this criticism of philosophy is valid, but again, socialism and Marxism aren’t philosophical ideas. They’re philosophical when it comes to the morality, sure, in the sense that I do believe that they’re morally superior to other systems, and that much is subjective. But the historical, economical, and political study of socialism and Marxism can be scientific. That doesn’t mean that every single book or article or essay on socialism is scientific, but that it can be approached as a science. Economic planning, the analysis of media, the economic analysis of capitalism and imperialism, all of those are very scientific, and the fact that you haven’t encountered scientific literature on them has more to do with your surrounding conditions or ideas than with the nature of the study debate of socialism. Especially nowadays, when there have been socialist attempts such as China, Vietnam, the USSR and the whole soviet block, Cuba… It’s very possible to do material, economical, historical and political analysis of socialism, and it’s routinely done, both from a subjective point of view and a scientific one.
The reasons I am jaded at dated books, is because the way of thinking can be so different, even in physics, many papers from early 20th century have god in the picture or see the human as some kind of special consciousness in the picture of the universe.
Being critical is good. Criticising them without making an attempt to read them based on preconceived notions isn’t. You talk about the scientific method which is great for me, since I work in that field. To me, the most important part of the scientific method are predictive capabilities. Without proving predictive capabilities, there can be no science. And when you read Lenin’s work “Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism”, and it can successfully make predictions about the economy that are valid more than 100 years ago, such as the tendency towards monopoly of capitalism (as we can see with Nestlè, Amazon or Google), or later stages of capitalism shifting from the export of manufactured goods to other countries to the export of capital to other countries (look at how much capital entered China since the 80s from capitalist countries), I’m as amazed as I am when Einstein’s theory of general relativity is yet again confirmed 100 years after its writing when SUPERLIGO is capable of detecting the gravitational waves of a collision of black holes. Especially because he was running against many economists of back in the day who were already claiming that the best way to solve monopoly was through progressive regulations… and look where that’s led us.
Regarding your discussion of how the USSR managed to defeat nazism, yes, lots of people died, but what can be expected? The USSR had 20 years to industrialize against the 150 years of Germany, of course their army wasn’t as capable or developed as the German one. This whole “meat grinder” vision of USSR in WW2 stems from Nazi propaganda, in which the Nazis were justifying losing against the “Slavic Untermenschen” because of the infinite “hordes of Asians” that they were throwing at them, and talking of the brave fight of the Soviets against Nazism as a “meat grinder” is very insulting towards the population of those countries. Belarus lost 25% of its population during WW2, and reducing their contribution to the war to “a meat grinder” is horrendous IMO.
it was a feudal state throwing meat at the problem (or rather opportunity). Among other atrocities such as forced famine Holodomor.
You don’t understand what “feudal” means. Feudal isn’t a synonym of agricultural or poor, feudal refers to a particular system of social relations, where serfs are bound to work the land of their lords without a wage on exchange, but instead receiving military protection on exchange for a compulsory requisition of the goods produced by the land, paid in kind. Again, when you use those terms in this fashion, you’re proving that you haven’t studied the true meaning of what you’re talking about.
Regarding Holodomor, it happened during the collectivization of agriculture, and it happened because of a combination of bad planning in collectivization (doing it too fast), unfair and poorly-planned requisitions of grain in certain regions such as Ukraine or Central Asia in general (which people often forget about because then they can’t make baseless claims of genocide against Ukrainians), sabotage by Kulaks, and bad crops. But this is the first and last famine that the USSR saw, and it happened prior to the industrialization of the country. Almost as if famines are commonplace in preindustrial societies, huh? Almost as if Russia was a region which has suffered historically about 5 famines per century. That’s not to say it wasn’t intensified by poor planning by the government, but again, first and last famine in the USSR. And it’s not like capitalism doesn’t create famines. Just some years later, during WW2, the British provoked a famine in India (Benghal Famine if you’re interested) which killed 3+mn people, and that one was actually done with explicitly racist undertones, with Churchill famously justifying the famine by telling Indians that “they reproduced like rabbits”.
that USSR finally imploded
If 1970s USSR was this great superpower, then somehow 10 years later it fell to stagnation and then collapse?
Because, again, you’re not being faithful to reality. The USSR never impoded, and it never collapsed. The USSR did suffer a period of stagnation, but how exactly does stagnation lead to collapse? Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. The USSR was dissolved illegally and antidemocratically against a referendum carried out in 1991, from the top down, by the Gorbachev administration. This is indeed a consequence of one of the biggest problems of the USSR: the immense concentration of power at the top spheres of government. But you can’t accuse the USSR of collapsing. In fact your reasoning is backwards. If the USSR survived to a civil war in which 14 foreign countries invaded it, if it survived to a WW2 where 25+ million inhabitants perished, and if it survived to the Cuban Missiles crisis, how on Earth is it supposed to crumble under stagnation? As I said I’m Spanish, Spain hasn’t grown AT ALL in per-capita terms since 2007, so it’s been stagnant for almost two decades at this point. Would you say it’s a failed state and that it’s collapsed and the government should be dismantled, or is economical stagnation really not that big a thing? The USSR was burdened with problems with economic planning (very hard to do properly before modern computers, if you’re interested in this I suggest that you read “People’s Republic of Walmart”, a book that outlines arguments for economic planning and criticises planning within the USSR as antidemocratic and inefficient), with overspending in military (triggered and forced by the USA despite the constant attempts of the USSR to try and reduce tensions and reach deals about disarmament and deescalation), and several other problems. But the moment it all started going down (and not just stagnating) is after the mid-80s, when Perestroika was applied and huge swaths of the economy were suddenly liberalized and subjected to markets.[1/2]
[2/2] What really made the former USSR actually collapse, was the neoliberal shock therapy applied after its illegal dissolution, supervised and directed by “prestigious experts” from MIT and by the IMF. There, the GDP fell as dramatically as it does in war times, and the situation was so dire that the population loss due to alcoholism, suicide, lowering standards of life and healthcare, missing births, depression, unemployment, etc. are numbered in millions of lives lost, and many millions more ruined. That’s the moment when good’ol capitalism auctioned the entire country to a few corrupt oligarchs because the priority was to privatize everything as quickly as possible, and which led to the modern fascist oligarchic kleptocratic government in Russia. But these millions of lives lost and ruined by capitalism don’t count, do they? These were somehow a necessity, unlike Holodomor, a famine in a preindustrial society.
Europe has achieved the highest quality of life in the world not by a planned economy, but by mediating the inherent problems of capitalism (monopolism, elitism, class warfare) and complete socialism (government overreach, lack of freedom, lack of democracy).
Europe has achieved the highest quality of life through a combination of imperialism and resource, wealth and labour extraction from underdeveloped countries (look up the concept of unequal exchange if you’re interested), and last century’s worker movements which achieved significant improvements in the quality of life of people, and obviously due to technical and scientific progress. But these worker victories were achieved DESPITE capitalism, not because of it.
And the technical and scientific improvements that happen under capitalism, funnily enough, are funded mostly by public research, in which universities and pulic institutions will do the brunt of the research, and then a few companies will cherrypick whatever they deem profitable, study a bit further, patent it, and then sell it to the rest of the world at exorbitant prices, as we see blatantly and glaringly with medicine and pharma. I’ll remind you which country in the world was the first to double-vaccinate 95%+ of its population against COVID: Cuba. With state-funded research, and state-funded vaccine production, with the goal of vaccinating as many as possible as soon as possible, instead of the objective of maximizing profit. Or just look on how much governmetns spent funding big pharma to develop the vaccines. This progress isn’t BECAUSE of the private sector and capitalism, it’s DESPITE it.
hould include some international cooperation, and if it isn’t possible (and seems it isn’t)
This was already obvious to Lenin in his 1917 work “Imperialism: the highest stage of Capitalism”, where he extensively criticises the idea of “ultraimperialism” or long-term collaboration between different capitalist world powers as impossible (again a successful prediction more than 100 years ago, how lucky is that?).
Corruption is indeed something that must be fought, and it wouldn’t disappear in a socialist society, as it didn’t USSR (where you could get anything for favors if you knew the right people).
Obviously corruption happens everywhere, but it’s a very different problem systemically when the means of production are owned collectively. Because, suddenly there are no private companies with the private interest of maximizing profit at all costs. So you don’t have the car factory paying the goverment official to be able to dump waste in the river, or the construction firm paying the local town hall to requalify their lands and allow for a construction plan. Embezzling and favors still exist within socialism, but without a profit motive, many other types of corruptions disappear. If there’s no wealthy ruling class whose existence and profit depends on the exploitation of the working class, suddenly there’s no wealthy powerful people doing everything legally and illegally possible to maximize their profits.
The 20th century period across Europe was indeed a rough one, many countries went fascist (Spain, Portugal, Russia
Russia went fascist? Excuse me? The USSR is the ONLY country in Europe which supported the Republicans in Spain in their fight against ACTUAL fascism, while Britain and France looked at the Nazis and the Italian Fascists supplying weapons to the reactionaries and literally bombing republican Spain, and claimed “best we can do is non-intervention and a volunteer corps” (brigadas internacionales, my utmost respect to all who participated in them)
Still, I don’t think it’s a novel example. And it’s also not an example against the current state of Europe, it’s an example of the inequality and volatility of European countries at the time.
Again, you’re failing to have a proper understanding of the reasons for fascism to exist. Fascism is a reactionary movement which takes place when the wealthy elites of a country see themselves threatened by the mobilization of the working class. It happened like this in Spain, it happened like this in Germany, it happened like this in Italy, and it attempted to happen in Russia as well (look up what the Black Hundreds were, and how Bolsheviks eliminated them). One of the most explicit purposes of fascism is to eliminate socialism and anarchism from society, for the most part through violent means. Fascism isn’t a consequence of “instability”, it’s a response to socialist movements and worker coordination.
The idea behind representative democracy is that I cannot do the work of a law-maker, deal with tax policy details while also living a life, so I elect someone whom I think I can trust.
Elected representatives aren’t a bad idea in itself, they’re just proven not to be democratic in western capitalist systems, in the sense that they don’t make decisions that represent the majority, but instead make decisions which represent a wealthy minority. Again, how many people in the EU wanted to apply austerity policy after the 2008 crisis, whose consequences we suffer to this very day? If you want an example of what real democracy looks like to me, I recommend you have a look at Pedro Ross’ book “How the workers parliaments saved the Cuban Revolution”, which details how after the dismantling of the USSR, Cuba was immersed in a deep economic crisis after losing its main trade partner, and how democratic participation by millions of people in the island was capable of saving people from the worst of the crisis.
If I have no trust in the system, I will go to the streets, as it was always the case. And yes, in this sense, we hold a lot of thankfulness for those that went to the streets before us to bring us to where we are now.
You hold them in high esteem, but then proceed to basically insult their legacy when you say that living conditions in western Europe are due to capitalism, instead of honoring the worker movements of the past century.
A society can’t be run on smartphones, this was patently obvious during the COVID pandemic, when governments had to decide which were the “essential jobs” that society literally wouldn’t keep running without. Were these the smartphone jobs? Or was it agriculture, education, transport of goods, supermarket cashiers, infrastructure, and trash collection among many others?
I’m fully aware that SOME people can get rich using a smartphone. Hell, I’m a lucky individual who had access to high level studies, and who fortunately enjoyed STEM, and my life is pretty dope, I consider myself very successful. I’m just not stupid enough to think that’s a sustainable, or even desirable model of society, where SOME people can be “successful” (assuming that your metric of success is income) by moving around numbers in investment funds or programming databases so that banks can surveil us and squeeze a few dollars more out of our pockets.
Reading the article made the word possible a lot less necessary than expected.
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Police responded to the apartment complex pool in Euless around 5:44 p.m. May 19 regarding “a disturbance between two women,” Euless police said in a news release.
“Upon arrival, officers were told by witnesses that a woman who was very intoxicated had tried to drown a child and argued with the child’s mother,” police said.
The child’s mother, 32, told police that the suspect, identified as Elizabeth Wolf, 42, questioned where she was from and made statements about her not being American, as well as “other racial statements.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, said in a news release that the mother visibly appeared to be Muslim, as she was wearing a hijab and modest swimwear. Wolf also asked the woman whether two of the children in the pool were hers before she tried to grab one of them, a 6-year-old boy, who was able to get away, police alleged.
“The mother began helping her son when Wolf grabbed her 3-year-old daughter and forced her underwater,” police said. “The mother was able to pull her daughter from the water. Her daughter had been yelling for help and was coughing up water.”
I may be ignorant of this, but weren’t plus-sized people already allowed on beaches? I’ve been to beaches along the Gulf of Mexico all of my life and have seen plenty of fat people there, and gone with my friends who are fat and never seemed to have any trouble.
It’s not about being allowed or not. It’s about creating an inclusive space for plus size people to comfortably sunbathe without being oggled and judged for their size, a privilege that others have more frequently.
Great in theory, but fat people will always be oggled at and judged for their size. All this will do is make a big spectacle and draw attention to those who really just want to be left the fuck alone to live their lives.
At the same time, encouraging obese people to go outside and get some exercise without worrying about how they look to others seems like something to encourage.
If they can go out to the beach and it wasn’t so bad, maybe they can go out to the gym on another day.
This wouldn’t happen for everyone, but if it helps a few people, then I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing.
My city has one or two trans bars. Cis people are allowed of course. But most of the clientele is some flavor trans or nonbinary.
It makes me feel so much less conspicuous when I look out at the crowd and realize I don’t stick out at all. I imagine this could serve a similar function to fat people who want to go to the beach.
That makes sense and works because it’s in an enclosed and private space. Fat day at the beach will quickly turn into a zoo exhibit for cruel people because the world is horrible.
Again, correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s the price that ANYONE pays going to the beach? Generally, you are wearing more revealing clothing, or more accentuates your body parts (wet swimsuits do not hide much). So everyone can be ogled, in fact in my experience from my youth having lots of teenage boy friends, the more slim or conventionally attractive people tend to be ogled much more than those who are not.
I worked for a car selling website and one thing I loved was the lack of pressure. Now im in insurance and its way more stressful in that everything needs to work perfectly.
The former president has claimed the criminal charges against him will appeal to Black voters. In February, he told a group of Black conservatives that his indictments are “why the Black people like me.”
Holy hell…could he be more insulting? “They’re all crooks so they’ll like me because I’m a crook like them”.
Oh, they’ve lightly retconned it to mean “I’m persecuted for false charges like them” but that’s not what he said on the first go around. And he did exactly to the black community what he says they should relate to him for when he went after the Central Park Five.
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