They really are dumb enough to believe this.
Politics is sexual pathology.
heya it's madeline albright
Is that a molotov in your pants or are you just happy to see me?
I laughed.Is that a molotov in your pants or are you just happy to see me?
https://twitter.com/offalnaut/status/925014812786085888
Not gonna lie, it gives me a rash. Maybe i need to see a doctor about it. Good thing i've socialized medical care down here.
**wink wink
It's kind of funny that I'm in one of the few industries left in the US which has strong unionization and I have the kind of benefits that our conservative friends cannot comprehend, like sick leave, paid vacations, retirement plan, pension, the works. I feel lucky to be in a union in the US where workers basically have the right to work until they die and little else.Not gonna lie, it gives me a rash. Maybe i need to see a doctor about it. Good thing i've socialized medical care down here.
**wink wink
This made me remember this pic edit
of Young Stalin
Some people in my group Almost become tankies with It
Wow, now that's some deep political analysis.
wasn't sure where else to put this, but came across this really interesting new series on the black experience of the Russian Revolution http://www.aaihs.org/tag/black-october/
Wow, now that's some deep political analysis.
"If it's cool between american kids today, it will change american politics tomorrow"
So the leftists x right-wingers discussion of the future will be about the correct hand to use a fidget spinner?
This got lost on the last page but I found it very interesting, thank you. Black socialists have been struggling to make the movement intersectional for ages. It's a shame some socialists still can't quite put 2 and 2 together.
It's already a thing as far as extremely online people are concerned
I evaluate people's politics based on how their work serves the interests of capital or the working class for which Hillary Clinton fails miserably on that front and at the same time she isn't calling for the workers to seize the means of production so I'm not sure on what planet she could be classified as a socialist. On the other hand I'm not a ideological purist, and I think the likes of people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who while aren't socialists according to the classical term have done more to advance the interests of the working class than sects like the sprats and the WSW (who are definitely both socialists but pretty "crap ones").Well, of course this is exactly what a socialist would say about another socialist. Pretty standard splitter discourse.
I dunno man, on a practical level I'm not sure how I'd go about doing international solidarity work if I didn't have some principled opposition to the US imperialist war machine esp when working with communities who are very negatively impacted by western imperialism i.e philippines, pakistan, and I don't think the US left from my perspective has being strong enough on the whole question of imperialism.This ties to one of the main issues I perceive with the left today, which is that the ideological commitment to opposing the international Pax Americana status quo at all levels makes it impossible to articulate a functional, coherent and humane foreign policy.
I don't get what you are saying here.It's not clear to me by what means you feel able to judge somebody's inmost ideals. Frankly, I think the desire to do so, much less the conceit that you have the ability to do so, is intrinsically problematic, and tends to lead to conversations just like the one that's happening in this thread, where the people you like are assumed to always be honest even when they lie and the people you dislike are assumed to be dishonest even when they have no reason to be. This is is why technocrats took over, they focused on results rather than Humean froth!
But it's completely nonsensical to call Hillary a socialist she is very much the furthest thing from one and proudly wears the non-socialist label on her sleeves, and again as I've indicated before I don't think the "socialist" label is inherently indicative of how good someones politics can be, although I do strongly feel the best social democrats will always fall short because of their unwillingness to challenge the capitalist system, but of course if we are playing with classifications that's because I identify as a socialist that thinks that it's a necessary alternative that people like us run society instead of the 1%!Personally I don't think this tangent about whether Hillary Clinton is a socialist is particularly important, but it's a little surprising to me to see how many people feel very strongly that they need to argue about it!
Marx was from a time before the invention of calculus? Venezuela is socialist?? Socialism == central planning??? Some hot opinions here.Socialism doesn't work because there is a problem to how much information a human or a collaboration of humans can physically process. A dictator or a central planner cannot exceed a pricing system in terms of allocation of resources. A price limits scarcity and it produces availability at the same time. If a product is harder to ship or export or produce, the price changes dynamically so that product is still available.
Socialist governments have a very very hard time allocating resources. The USSR just gave up, and it collapsed. Venezuela attempted socialism again, and they are too poor to even export oil (!) and oil is the most valuable resource in the world.
I believe that socialist governments made an earnest attempt to make an alternative to capitalism, and it was a very good try, and were an attempt of a "natural experiment" on the economy. We can now see socialism doesn't work from a scientific standpoint, and we should move on. Karl Marx made a good critique about capitalism, but he was from a time before the invention of calculus. We have much better economic thought than what socialists envisioned, and I recommend reading literature from Milton Friedman, John Maynard Keynes, and my favorite Friedrich Hayek.
I really like Friedrich Hayek. He had a metaphor for socialists who all envisioned or dreamed about the world without capitalism. Socialists all have the same desire, to create a "better world," but they all have different idea of how to do it or what should be done. Socialists are all on the same boat, but they all have a different idea of where they are going.
Yeah, you're absolutely right, I'm seeing this happening in Brazil too.
Socialism doesn't work because there is a problem to how much information a human or a collaboration of humans can physically process. A dictator or a central planner cannot exceed a pricing system in terms of allocation of resources. A price limits scarcity and it produces availability at the same time. If a product is harder to ship or export or produce, the price changes dynamically so that product is still available.
Socialist governments have a very very hard time allocating resources. The USSR just gave up, and it collapsed. Venezuela attempted socialism again, and they are too poor to even export oil (!) and oil is the most valuable resource in the world.
I believe that socialist governments made an earnest attempt to make an alternative to capitalism, and it was a very good try, and were an attempt of a "natural experiment" on the economy. We can now see socialism doesn't work from a scientific standpoint, and we should move on.
Karl Marx made a good critique about capitalism, but he was from a time before the invention of calculus. We have much better economic thought than what socialists envisioned, and I recommend reading literature from Milton Friedman, John Maynard Keynes, and my favorite Friedrich Hayek.
It is, but its also the one of the three that maybe has the most social bullshit we have to get throughThere are empty homes all over the U.S. More than there are homeless people in the U.S. Housing scarcity is as artificial as anything in capitalism.
It is, but its also the one of the three that maybe has the most social bullshit we have to get through
This would be perfect if markets actually worked consistently. In practice, in some situations they do and in some situations they don't, and the situations in which they don't are rapidly expanding. Public goods don't work with a market structure, monopolistic entities corrupt them, crony capitalism damages them, etc.
In a world in which everything in America costs six to eight times as much in real dollars as they did sixty years ago even as our production of wealth has multiplied by many degrees, it's simply Pollyannaish to say that "the free market will just allocate resources to fix it." It's already failed! The neoliberal dream of lowering the cost of everything by producing more has had literally the exact opposite effect it was intended to create.
Given that the free market doesn't work, it's necessary to manage it in some way. Whether you want to do that with a central planner (more realistic now that computing power has multiplied so aggressively) or simply with a managed market, ultimately some aspect of socialist thought will be involved.
It's also worth noting that this argument is purely about the functioning of the economy, while socialism is ultimately a moral question. I am less concerned with the market working and more concerned with ensuring that people are not coerced with the threat of death into giving up most of the proceeds of their labor to rentiers.
Are you unironically sporting a TPP avatar? Azzanadra iz much confused
I think a socialist probably wouldn't support price gouging the global south by limiting access cheap generic pharmaceuticals in order to profit the wealthy domestic drug companies.Can't a socialist support good foreign policy initiatives intended to protect smaller countries from a large crony capitalist police state?
Yeah Bonen just gave a few examples of the many problems with the TPP, and that's not even getting into the universally terrible stuff like the IP laws.
Also, Hillary, a socialist? Even Bernie isn't a socialist let alone Hillary. I think Noam Chomsky said it best when he said that Bernie was basically a new-dealer, wonder what that would make Hillary...
Do you really need to keep relitigating the primary? This is the Socialism thread, just let Hillary go.
Edit: I dropped the argument specifically to avoid the entire thread spiraling into discussions of Hillary and people thinking I'm trolling. Until Bonen brought it up again just to pick fights!
It's kind of funny that I'm in one of the few industries left in the US which has strong unionization and I have the kind of benefits that our conservative friends cannot comprehend, like sick leave, paid vacations, retirement plan, pension, the works. I feel lucky to be in a union in the US where workers basically have the right to work until they die and little else.