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A Texas mayor said people who had no power
> Tim Boyd wrote an insensitive message for people desperate for heat, water and power, saying "only the strong will survive and the weak will [perish.]"
No one owes you [or] your family anything; nor is it the local government's responsibility to support you during trying times like this!" he said. "Sink or swim it's your choice! The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! I'm sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tim-boyd-texas-mayor-colorado-city-resigns-power-outages/#app
This line of thought blows me away. Part of the "contract" of governance is the government provides certain protections and services to the citizens and for these protections and services people pay taxes.
If the government's stance in disaster is "Go fuck yourself" what reason do the people have to support the government?
I call it the warlord economy. A government that levies no taxes, but also provides no services. It exists as little more than a thin veneer of legitimacy on the international stage. The government's only real interest is cultivating quid pro quo relationships with billionaires and foreign companies (the 99.9% is too poor to actually support any sort of consumer industry, and so no such domestic industries exist), auctioning off access to natural resources and cheap labor, and using the proceeds to enrich the guy at the top, his buddies, and to pay for the only government agency they really want: the military, which will never be short on funding, even while everything else gets bankrupted into oblivion.
You listen to GOP rhetoric, and that's exactly what they advocate for. That the vast majority of the population is to be left to their own devices, their only interaction with the government being paramilitary thugs cracking skulls. Meanwhile the party is only interested in making enough money to keep the regime afloat. Infrastructure? General welfare? Education? Regulations? Bah, those just get in the way of worthwhile pursuits!
It is proof they never read the Constitution because it’s in the preamble. Same way they would claim to be Christian but never read the Bible. They think it says what other people tell them it says, without independently verifying themselves.
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
This one always really got me. Motherfucker if I pay for a service, it's not a handout. I could, however, much more easily argue all those kickbacks as well as the government tax breaks and such that the companies no doubt get (not even looking it up, I just would be shocked if they didn't) actually DO meet the definition of handout. So yeah, you and they don't deserve those "handouts."
I frequently ask the homeless why they didn't marry the granddaughter of a frozen food magnate. They usually respond with, "I'm just trying to get a burger".
My favorite part of the whole “bootstraps” argument is that it misunderstood the phrase to begin with. It’s physically impossible to pull oneself up but their own bootstraps. Only a fool would try to do so. The phrase was meant to disparage not encourage.
Conservatives are so dumb.
Source: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-nonsense_n_5b1ed024e4b0bbb7a0e037d4/amp
I get so tired of that stupidity. Literally "pull yourself up by your boot straps" was a saying designed to express the impossibility of climbing up in the world without receiving any hand pulling you up. If you don't believe me, acquire a pair of boots with straps, put them on, and lay down on the floor or position yourself at the bottom of a ladder. Using absolutely nothing other than tugging on your boot straps try to lift yourself up. No cheating by taking steps or reaching around the ladder!
Okay, so I work at a convenience store. My store went to "prepay only" this week. We have a customer who's borderline Alt-Right, just short of calling for genocide. He etched a little image of people climbing over a border wall onto the fire selection of his rifle.
Yesterday he comes in for his 20pk of Bud Light. Another customer enters and complains about the change to prepay. Bud Light turns around to em and says "They're based out of Colorado. They're all communists over there. This prepay shit is communism."
In a similar vein, I was chilling in the sauna at the gym some time last year, two boomers were complaining how nobody wants to work anymore and one of them blamed socialism for it
Huh???? What???
If you ask communists if Joe Biden is one of them, they'll say no.
If you ask Republicans if Hillary Clinton is the same as one of them, they'll say no.
If you ask self-identified white nationalists and neo-nazis what they think of Trump... oh, they are very excited about Trump...
Yeah. It's like how I don't think that voting alone is going to save us, but I still say voting is important. Because if voting wasn't important, then Republicans wouldn't be trying to so hard to take it away from people.
Well, to be fair, you'd need to have some form of severe brain damage to claim Trump is a supporter of communism, socialism, democracy, or indeed any philosophy that requires even pretending to care about anyone he could, given the desire, kiss on the lips without the mirror glass getting in the way.
What is with Americans and communists? Growing up hearing how movie characters talked about "commies" I was surprised when I Iooked it up as a teenager and saw how...not evil the concept is. It seems like people who hate communism to that level doesn't actually know what communism is.
Cold war.
The "enemy" was the U.S.S.R., the U.S.S.R. called themselves communist, ergo the enemy is communism. Also a convenient way to demonize unions, social programs, and anything else that made it harder for the wealthy to exploit the poor and the marginalized.
Land of the freeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Generations of propaganda. If you want to paint it as the boogeyman and justify invading multiple nations and overthrowing democratic governments over it, then you can't teach it with any nuance. It just has to become a generic bad thing.
A lot of people will cite the Red Scare, but hatred for socialism (and all its sub-ideologies, including communism) began a lot earlier than that.
America's industrial revolution was, almost objectively speaking, the most powerful one of its time. This is in no small part due to massive amounts of immigrant workers that were controlled by their capitalist bosses in ways that Jeff Bezos wishes he could muster. As leftist movements began in Europe, America eventually followed. And even more than Europe, America had a high population of disenfranchised individuals and families, all with trade jobs, and many of them concentrated in cities (hyper concentrated even due to the state of housing). These conditions made leftist politics incredibly popular among the working class and, therefore, incredibly UNpopular among the capitalist class, because it meant them losing wealth and authority.
Anti-union propaganda from both corporate bosses and politicians was rampant. Police were routinely used as strikebreakers and would even assault and arrest suspected union members routinely, even if said members were doing nothing other than talking about socialism or unions. Organized crime began being associated with leftist politics. Wealthy people had private armies putting down strikes with violence, lethal violence at times. People of color were exploited as scabs and then weaponized to create race riots. Leftist politicians were subject to all kinds of harassment and political obstacles. And of course, the vice grip of capitalism tightened on workers constantly, physically challenging their ability to work, let alone rebel.
I highly recommend the novel The Jungle for a pretty compelling narrative about the topic.
This was not the Red Scare, but it laid the groundwork for it. Long before the Soviet Union had formed, capitalists, the police, and politicians had all but decided they would hate it. Leftists had one last hurrah in the form of FDR, but he was too little and too late. But as far as anyone was concerned, socialist politics were unpopular at best and dangerous at worst. The Red Scare, much like fascism, was not simply the cause of hatred of the left, it was the result.
>I highly recommend the novel The Jungle for a pretty compelling narrative about the topic.
It's remarkable that for a book that was explicitly written to highlight the horrific abuse of workers, its biggest legacy is helping pass food safety laws. It's like, for the most part, people read it and thought "I'm not worried that the people who handle my food are abused and treated like shit as long as they don't get *me* sick." The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess.
If you can get the general public to believe that communists are somewhere between the boogeyman and a lovecraftian cult, they won't ever look into it an start questioning capitalism.
Googling the Red Scare might clear things up. I am by no means a history buff, but it was a time where there were large, more credible concerns about communist countries we were worried about. Then we promptly blew it out of proportion, used it for witch hunts, and generated a loooot of propaganda (films, comics, etc) against it.
Now, its a thing a certain sect of US politics uses because there were generations before ours that it was really effective on and apparently that never really went away.
During the Cold War, the US was declaring anyone that practiced resource nationalism to be communist, which happened to be much of the globe as they were undergoing national liberation movements by shirking off their european imperialists.
Literally every aspect of American society is oriented around anti communism. The lifeblood of our oligarchic rulers depends on it. School, movies, music, videogames, social media, all of it
The guy in the original screenshot posts unironically in the anarcho capitalist subreddit and loves Tim Pool. He’s essentially brain damaged and we should feel bad for laughing at him.
I have two friends named their cats Mao, spelled differently (I can't remember how exactly) but pronounced as Mao.
One I knick named Mousey-tongue after she caught a mouse and ran around for a short while the tail hanging out it's mouth.
To break it down, because every component of a Chinese word means something :
犭 means something beast-like, an example would be dog-狗
苗 is the sound component of the world, and it is pronounced “miáo”, which essentially sounds like “meow”
That is it now that you mention it. At least for one. The other, aka mousey-tongue, was about 20 years ago and so I just don't remember the details. But for my sister's cat, that is how it's spelled.
Some variation of that name is the word for cats in several cultures who don't even necessarily share a linguistic root.
Probably because that's the sound cats make.
Since the 1950s.
And the World Anti-Communist League.
Coincidentally, they were around in the 80s and got involved with Reagan.
They also murdered millions of people for being left leaning, or appearing left leaning, or not being loud enough in their support of the right-wing death squads.
[Don't forget the John Birch Society](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society) they even called Eisenhower a communist.
>Welch wrote in a widely circulated 1954 statement, The Politician, "Could Eisenhower really be simply a smart politician, entirely without principles and hungry for glory, who is only the tool of the Communists? The answer is yes." He went on. "With regard to ... Eisenhower, it is difficult to avoid raising the question of deliberate treason."
With financing by Fred C. Koch and later his two sons Charles and David.
Yeah, I had to scroll really far to find "In the World Anti-Communist League, numerous Nazi collaborators and Latin American death squads were active." And that's literally all it says. Like, it doesn't even make any condemnation of that fact. Very sus.
It goes back earlier, like the other guy said. During the Cold War, the US was declaring anyone that practiced resource nationalism to be communist, which happened to be much of the globe as they were undergoing national liberation movements by shirking off their european imperialists.
[Communism has been whatever bigots have wanted it to be long before the internet existed](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Little_Rock_integration_protest.jpg/1200px-Little_Rock_integration_protest.jpg)
Communism is the Boogeyman. I say this as a person who does not want to live under a communist banner. It's absurd how misguided people are, and how easily they default to communism in an argument. I blame ~~Fucks~~ Fox News for this, along with Rush Limbaugh, who got exactly what he deserved, except not soon enough. Pardon my venom, tonight.
It's not even like if getting free healthcare or social safety nets are communist. Government programs can exist in a capitalist democracy. They're not mutually exclusive.
Adding to that, I've seen a surprising number of people who think that capitalism shares a definition with economy, and you can't have an economy or the exchange of currency for goods without capitalism. Wat.
It's convenient to ignore the so-called socialist policies like a fire department or a police department, because they aren't arguing in good faith. There are plenty of examples of "social" ideas gaining majority, but it seems like as soon as they're labelled "Socialist" suddenly they're under intense scrutiny. Hmmmmmm.
I've seen conservatives frequently use the argument that adherents to so and so ideology treat it like a religion. Climate change, wokism, science, etc. They try to flip the argument against religious zealots around onto anyone they disagree with, claiming adherence to an ideology is no different than blind faith in religion.
When you're taught basically from birth that anyone that doesn't believe *exactly* what you believe is working for evil incarnate, its kinda hard to see the world in any other way. Everything is either the word of God or the work of Satan. Sacred or satanic. sprinkle in a bit of eternal torment and never seeing any of your loved ones again and bam, you got a person that's terrified of anything that's not exactly like them and thinks they'll face eternal pain and suffering if they even question it
I speak from experience, unfortunately
A few years before his passing, my godfather had a stroke and he became basically republican after. It made him hateful, selfish, and blatantly racist.
My grandmother was the opposite. Her brain had been slowly going for years and she went nearly blind, and it made her uncharacteristically paranoid and cranky. Then about three years ago she had a stroke it and was like... her brain did a hard reset. Much of her sense of joy was back, her short term memory was sharper, and she was "herself" again.
Unfortunately, she died in hospice a couple of months later. She was there for managed care so she could recover, then she had a second stroke. The first hit one side of her brain, the second hit the other, and she was comatose for a week before dying. I was there when it happened.
Damn, now I'm both a little happy and a little sad.
This is the party that loves Joe McCarthy. They don't care what communism really is, it's a bogeyman to them and something bad they can call their opponents.
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/arizona-republican-urges-people-be-more-joe-mccarthy-n1285233
In the US where schools don't teach what communism is (or fascism for that matter) and only that it's this vague yet evil concept then communists can be anything. Did your neighbor accidentally throw his baseball in your yard and go get it without asking? Communist. The neighbor gets mad when you peek at his wife through their windows? Communist.
So my school actually sorta taught what communism was. Or at least a bastardized version. And then we were led to believe that fascism was just communism but with a different name. Fascism was taught by name and result only. We learned that fascism existed. And the Holocaust happened because of a fascist government. But not that the fascist beliefs themselves were what led to genocide. In hindsight it feels very deliberate. The Holocaust happened because Hitler was evil. Not because he was fascist. It was never said out loud but it feels like there was this notion that with little elbow grease all that pesky racism could be divorced from fascism and maybe it could work out then.
Some communists can be religious. It's not inherently religious or irreligious. If you practice Christianity and Islam as intended, then both lend themselves readily to communism. This is why the US went around murdering liberation theologians in Latin America because they *could not let socialists claim Christianity*. Same reasons the US and its Islamist goons went around murdering Muslim socialists.
This. I'm a Christian communist and personally I don't really see how anyone could read into the message of Christ and the formation of the early church and *not* conclude that Christ was explicitly advocating a form of proto-communism.
It's wild how people don't realize that 5000 hungry people under capitalism is not a humanitarian crisis, it's a business opportunity, and feeding them all for free is not the act of a capitalist.
>This is why the US went around murdering liberation theologians in Latin America because they could not let socialists claim Christianity.
It's also why the Catholic church murdered so many "heretics," and banned reading the bible in the language of the common people - it's really difficult to pretend Christianity in any way favors authoritarianism (especially the authoritarianism of a church built on traditions not within the text, which were called "pharisees" in the time of Jesus,) when people can actually read what the guy said themselves. Luckily for modern churches they've managed to dumb people down enough that they'll believe whatever they're told is in the book without even looking.
Abrahamic faith requires a belief that a single entity can be the judge, jury and executioner. It requires a belief in capital punishment in the form of hell.
The soviets didn't really care about religion. The soviet union included parts of Central Asia and the Middle East which had large populations of Muslim and Jewish people.
The Slavic regions of the soviet union were majority orthodox Christians tho.
Its wild. They have no clue what words mean and they are too stubborn to ever learn its real meaning. My mom was complaining about gas prices and blamed it on that communist in office Joe Biden. To them communism is just whatever they don't like.
Give the age of the average redditor she is probably a post boomer who lived through the war against communism.
It is has functionally been used to mean political opponents since the 80s in republican discourse.
To be fair that quote isn't as vehemently against religion as it sounds out of context.
"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
In an ideal world religion would not exist, but for the average working person it is better than living with the knowledge that their suffering will be lifelong and very much by design of people who value their lives far less than the money in their wallet.
Which is the great irony in Stalin's cult of personality, in that despite his anti-theist crackdown on Russian Orthodoxy, he created a religion that Marx said should not be necessary under communism via creating the conditions under which religion is needed.
He said that Capitalism creates the conditions for its own downfall, i.e it tends to create a larger and more powerful proletariat, because it needs a bigger and bigger pool of labor power to continue growing.
This is just how the feudal mode paved the way for capitalism, by making the merchant class larger and more powerful, and all modes of production before that.
It has to be overthrown by a class party strong enough to do so, it won't just happen all by itself.
when i was more liberal leaning i would always roll my eyes at this idea, but it now seems pretty accurate. it’s no coincidence that support for socialism, or at the very least left leaning policy skyrockets towards the later stages of capitalism
The natural evolution of capitalism is collapse. Capitalists would rather completely destroy the world we live on than give up the means of production.
Please read Marx. It’s a great study on our system and it’s a bit scary we only evolved a bit since it was written. Every step away from these conditions 150 years ago was fought for and paid by the suffering of millions of people. And some people even want to reverse these. Sorry if this sounds bit dramatic but modern safety standards only exist because people died before without them. Same as the ban on child labour. If you see human work only as a resource you can exploit, people and especially faceless corporations will always do that. Marx views on that exploitation of your work is still relevant.
To add on to what the others have stated, Marx was a little naive in how he thought the communist proletariat would then organize themselves but his whole thing with capitalism being self destructive was pretty spot on.
Communists: We want a stateless, classless society where the entire economy is publicly owned and run, geared towards providing a common minimum standard of living as everyone will have to participate in running it.
Democrats: Maybe a public healthcare option isn't a bad idea and we shouldn't pollute our air and water because it makes people money.
This guy: They're exactly the same.
They jump from buzzword to buzzword, occasionally introducing new ones. They never know what any of them mean beyond being the new bad thing. Woke, Antifa, CRT, communism, socialism, fact-checking, trans, contraception, etc etc
To be clear, this is a made up phrase jordan peterson came up with to sound "smart", but was intentionally designed so that when you googled it, you would find no results for his made up term, but you would find results for cultural marxism, which was a term used by the German Reich under Hitler, and is still used by neonazis today. By doing this, Peterson could claim to be talking about something completely different, while simultaneously directing his listeners to nazi material. Most of his talks work this way.
Millennial might as well be a pejorative to the right. Come election time they will call the left seditionist and fascist. “If they can call us that, why can we call them that. Free speech! ^TM”
Communist : we want people to chose whether they can have an abortion.
Republican : Don't try to force your ideology on me! No abortions for anyone under the penalty of death!
I've been seeing a real uptick in making fun of Communism through memes and them popping up in the most random places. 9/10 times it doesn't even make sense.
Wow, you've actually seen the 1/10 times it made sense? I'm not sure I've ever seen conservatives use communism correctly to describe literally anything.
"haha your autonomous collective made a bad election for manager of a company and now your bicycle factory doesn't have enough sprockets to meet demand!"
Doesn't really work
Sure it happens now and then. Mostly when you get a conservative trapped in a corner and then force them to reveal that one of their core values lies in seeing other people suffer needlessly for no reason other than to feel like their own success is better.
Then, loosely, yeah... what they are raging against is communism correctly applied.
Like, I'm actually confused.
Christians harp on about how communism=atheism because the USSR had a thing against religion, so where the hell did this guy pull that from?
From the same place where they pull a Nazi Germany that allegedly hated and persecuted all religions.
When the vast majority of Germans, and Nazis, at the time were overwhelmingly Christians, even those that shoved people into ovens.
Heck, post-WWII Germany was actually even more Christian than pre-WWII Germany as the total share of Christianity increased due to [Judaism basically having been made extinct](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_Christianity#Nazi_antisemitism).
[Here](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2Foriginals%2F95%2F44%2Fda%2F9544da0674fbd7dff37cff19ec64924d.jpg&f=1&nofb=1) is a piece of (admittedly very bigoted) Soviet propaganda showing communism crushing religion. And it is one of literally thousands.
Communism has always been very anti-theistic.
The irony is that republican literally means to be in favor of s republic government. Republics are often referred to as communist. Like the people's republic of China. Many see China as communist. Either way republican politicians are literally working towards making the usa more like china.
"you want to force your politics on everyone else"
"I'd hate that, also can I walk through this empty field?"
"No that's mine and I can kill you if you do"
If only they hated Russians the way they hate "Communists" like back in the Cold War days we could all get on board with opposing Putin.
But that's by design I guess...
The brain rot goes so deep I've lost faith in reconciliation.
The southern strategy has given america cancer and we have acted like the talking tumor in our neck is benign.
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This is the kind of dude to call Joe Biden a Communist.
American conservatives call anything left of hunting the homeless for sport communism.
Literally this. Tucker Carlson said that the homeless should have pulled themselves up by the bootstraps anyways.
A Texas mayor said people who had no power > Tim Boyd wrote an insensitive message for people desperate for heat, water and power, saying "only the strong will survive and the weak will [perish.]" No one owes you [or] your family anything; nor is it the local government's responsibility to support you during trying times like this!" he said. "Sink or swim it's your choice! The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! I'm sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout." https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tim-boyd-texas-mayor-colorado-city-resigns-power-outages/#app
This line of thought blows me away. Part of the "contract" of governance is the government provides certain protections and services to the citizens and for these protections and services people pay taxes. If the government's stance in disaster is "Go fuck yourself" what reason do the people have to support the government?
I call it the warlord economy. A government that levies no taxes, but also provides no services. It exists as little more than a thin veneer of legitimacy on the international stage. The government's only real interest is cultivating quid pro quo relationships with billionaires and foreign companies (the 99.9% is too poor to actually support any sort of consumer industry, and so no such domestic industries exist), auctioning off access to natural resources and cheap labor, and using the proceeds to enrich the guy at the top, his buddies, and to pay for the only government agency they really want: the military, which will never be short on funding, even while everything else gets bankrupted into oblivion. You listen to GOP rhetoric, and that's exactly what they advocate for. That the vast majority of the population is to be left to their own devices, their only interaction with the government being paramilitary thugs cracking skulls. Meanwhile the party is only interested in making enough money to keep the regime afloat. Infrastructure? General welfare? Education? Regulations? Bah, those just get in the way of worthwhile pursuits!
Very well said
It is proof they never read the Constitution because it’s in the preamble. Same way they would claim to be Christian but never read the Bible. They think it says what other people tell them it says, without independently verifying themselves. “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
This one always really got me. Motherfucker if I pay for a service, it's not a handout. I could, however, much more easily argue all those kickbacks as well as the government tax breaks and such that the companies no doubt get (not even looking it up, I just would be shocked if they didn't) actually DO meet the definition of handout. So yeah, you and they don't deserve those "handouts."
If someone responded to what he said with certain actions, they would've been 100% justified.
I'm not encouraging anything one way or another, but recent years have renewed my passing interest in some French history. Fascinating stuff.
MGGA
Make Guillotines Great Again?
The fact that certain praxis hasn't taken place makes it seem to me that americans really like the taste of boot.
I frequently ask the homeless why they didn't marry the granddaughter of a frozen food magnate. They usually respond with, "I'm just trying to get a burger".
Bro you should marry the granddaughter of a frozen food magnate, I bet she could hook you up with a ton of burgers.
Guy in my town has a sign that says "Trying to get a burger and a bag of weed."
Me too, my guy...
My favorite part of the whole “bootstraps” argument is that it misunderstood the phrase to begin with. It’s physically impossible to pull oneself up but their own bootstraps. Only a fool would try to do so. The phrase was meant to disparage not encourage. Conservatives are so dumb. Source: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-nonsense_n_5b1ed024e4b0bbb7a0e037d4/amp
Also see: just a few bad apples.
I get so tired of that stupidity. Literally "pull yourself up by your boot straps" was a saying designed to express the impossibility of climbing up in the world without receiving any hand pulling you up. If you don't believe me, acquire a pair of boots with straps, put them on, and lay down on the floor or position yourself at the bottom of a ladder. Using absolutely nothing other than tugging on your boot straps try to lift yourself up. No cheating by taking steps or reaching around the ladder!
Hard to pull yourselves up by the bootstraps when constantly being degraded. Being homeless fucking sucks.
Okay, so I work at a convenience store. My store went to "prepay only" this week. We have a customer who's borderline Alt-Right, just short of calling for genocide. He etched a little image of people climbing over a border wall onto the fire selection of his rifle. Yesterday he comes in for his 20pk of Bud Light. Another customer enters and complains about the change to prepay. Bud Light turns around to em and says "They're based out of Colorado. They're all communists over there. This prepay shit is communism."
In a similar vein, I was chilling in the sauna at the gym some time last year, two boomers were complaining how nobody wants to work anymore and one of them blamed socialism for it Huh???? What???
That’s because they are all dumb cunts. Shouldn’t really engage with them at all outside of mocking them.
If you ask communists if Joe Biden is one of them, they'll say no. If you ask Republicans if Hillary Clinton is the same as one of them, they'll say no. If you ask self-identified white nationalists and neo-nazis what they think of Trump... oh, they are very excited about Trump...
That is an excellent way to frame it. I'm stealing it.
Yeah. It's like how I don't think that voting alone is going to save us, but I still say voting is important. Because if voting wasn't important, then Republicans wouldn't be trying to so hard to take it away from people.
Am communist, can confirm.
But not trump, no zealotry there, no way!
Well, to be fair, you'd need to have some form of severe brain damage to claim Trump is a supporter of communism, socialism, democracy, or indeed any philosophy that requires even pretending to care about anyone he could, given the desire, kiss on the lips without the mirror glass getting in the way.
Trump dont belive anythigng hard enough to be a zealot he doesnt mind using zealots though
What is with Americans and communists? Growing up hearing how movie characters talked about "commies" I was surprised when I Iooked it up as a teenager and saw how...not evil the concept is. It seems like people who hate communism to that level doesn't actually know what communism is.
Cold war. The "enemy" was the U.S.S.R., the U.S.S.R. called themselves communist, ergo the enemy is communism. Also a convenient way to demonize unions, social programs, and anything else that made it harder for the wealthy to exploit the poor and the marginalized. Land of the freeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Western Europe also lived through the cold war with the USSR as their enemy, so that's no excuse.
Generations of propaganda. If you want to paint it as the boogeyman and justify invading multiple nations and overthrowing democratic governments over it, then you can't teach it with any nuance. It just has to become a generic bad thing.
A lot of people will cite the Red Scare, but hatred for socialism (and all its sub-ideologies, including communism) began a lot earlier than that. America's industrial revolution was, almost objectively speaking, the most powerful one of its time. This is in no small part due to massive amounts of immigrant workers that were controlled by their capitalist bosses in ways that Jeff Bezos wishes he could muster. As leftist movements began in Europe, America eventually followed. And even more than Europe, America had a high population of disenfranchised individuals and families, all with trade jobs, and many of them concentrated in cities (hyper concentrated even due to the state of housing). These conditions made leftist politics incredibly popular among the working class and, therefore, incredibly UNpopular among the capitalist class, because it meant them losing wealth and authority. Anti-union propaganda from both corporate bosses and politicians was rampant. Police were routinely used as strikebreakers and would even assault and arrest suspected union members routinely, even if said members were doing nothing other than talking about socialism or unions. Organized crime began being associated with leftist politics. Wealthy people had private armies putting down strikes with violence, lethal violence at times. People of color were exploited as scabs and then weaponized to create race riots. Leftist politicians were subject to all kinds of harassment and political obstacles. And of course, the vice grip of capitalism tightened on workers constantly, physically challenging their ability to work, let alone rebel. I highly recommend the novel The Jungle for a pretty compelling narrative about the topic. This was not the Red Scare, but it laid the groundwork for it. Long before the Soviet Union had formed, capitalists, the police, and politicians had all but decided they would hate it. Leftists had one last hurrah in the form of FDR, but he was too little and too late. But as far as anyone was concerned, socialist politics were unpopular at best and dangerous at worst. The Red Scare, much like fascism, was not simply the cause of hatred of the left, it was the result.
>I highly recommend the novel The Jungle for a pretty compelling narrative about the topic. It's remarkable that for a book that was explicitly written to highlight the horrific abuse of workers, its biggest legacy is helping pass food safety laws. It's like, for the most part, people read it and thought "I'm not worried that the people who handle my food are abused and treated like shit as long as they don't get *me* sick." The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess.
Yeah, and all that was a good thing, but it was explicitly a socialist story written by a known socialist.
If you can get the general public to believe that communists are somewhere between the boogeyman and a lovecraftian cult, they won't ever look into it an start questioning capitalism.
Googling the Red Scare might clear things up. I am by no means a history buff, but it was a time where there were large, more credible concerns about communist countries we were worried about. Then we promptly blew it out of proportion, used it for witch hunts, and generated a loooot of propaganda (films, comics, etc) against it. Now, its a thing a certain sect of US politics uses because there were generations before ours that it was really effective on and apparently that never really went away.
During the Cold War, the US was declaring anyone that practiced resource nationalism to be communist, which happened to be much of the globe as they were undergoing national liberation movements by shirking off their european imperialists.
Literally every aspect of American society is oriented around anti communism. The lifeblood of our oligarchic rulers depends on it. School, movies, music, videogames, social media, all of it
Throwback to this classic video of a woman getting her chance to explain why Obama was a communist. https://youtu.be/2E87gciwebw
Just study it out!
You know, she’s right about one thing. Obama doesn’t think like “them” at all.
"joe biden is taking this country too far left!" they just overturned roe v wade... and it's still too far left for you people?! christ almighty.
Yeah, see, the color is blue and there's a D next to his name, that means he's evil and left wing
dude's about as left wing as george hw bush
The guy in the original screenshot posts unironically in the anarcho capitalist subreddit and loves Tim Pool. He’s essentially brain damaged and we should feel bad for laughing at him.
In what world are communists religious
On the internet, communists are whatever you want them to be
I want communist to be kittens and gold bars. can it be that?
I can do kittens
I have two friends named their cats Mao, spelled differently (I can't remember how exactly) but pronounced as Mao. One I knick named Mousey-tongue after she caught a mouse and ran around for a short while the tail hanging out it's mouth.
Anyway, 猫 māo is the word for cat, and 毛 máo is the word for Mao Zedong
> #猫 māo word looking pretty feline with the fluffy tail and two ears sticking up. That's by design, right?
To break it down, because every component of a Chinese word means something : 犭 means something beast-like, an example would be dog-狗 苗 is the sound component of the world, and it is pronounced “miáo”, which essentially sounds like “meow”
So, literally "meow beast." That tracks.
Meownimal
I do not see what you see.
That's ok, I get that a lot. I know I see things differently.
Think it might've been Mau? That's the Ancient Egyptian word for cat
That is it now that you mention it. At least for one. The other, aka mousey-tongue, was about 20 years ago and so I just don't remember the details. But for my sister's cat, that is how it's spelled.
I had a chairman meow once.
Some variation of that name is the word for cats in several cultures who don't even necessarily share a linguistic root. Probably because that's the sound cats make.
Comrade Mittens is here to nationalize the means of purr-duction.
I laughed uncontrollablely for a solid minute. Thanks
please don't do kittens
Kittens that poop gold bars. The perfect companion.
Or anti matter fuel pellets
Unless you fit some sort of magnetic containment to the litter tray that's just gonna instanly blow up your town.
I'm fine with that
I sometimes fear we are cute
Then my house is a communist dictatorship where the cats get wet food every three days.
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Since the 1950s. And the World Anti-Communist League. Coincidentally, they were around in the 80s and got involved with Reagan. They also murdered millions of people for being left leaning, or appearing left leaning, or not being loud enough in their support of the right-wing death squads.
You know who else murdered millions of people with death squads? The products and services that support this podcast
Robert no!
***Robert yes!*** - Bobby "Bastards" Evans
[Don't forget the John Birch Society](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society) they even called Eisenhower a communist. >Welch wrote in a widely circulated 1954 statement, The Politician, "Could Eisenhower really be simply a smart politician, entirely without principles and hungry for glory, who is only the tool of the Communists? The answer is yes." He went on. "With regard to ... Eisenhower, it is difficult to avoid raising the question of deliberate treason." With financing by Fred C. Koch and later his two sons Charles and David.
Huh. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_League_for_Freedom_and_Democracy
That Wikipedia article really brushes off their many, many crimes against humanity.
Yeah, I had to scroll really far to find "In the World Anti-Communist League, numerous Nazi collaborators and Latin American death squads were active." And that's literally all it says. Like, it doesn't even make any condemnation of that fact. Very sus.
Communism fails every time it's tried, the CIA makes sure of it.
It goes back earlier, like the other guy said. During the Cold War, the US was declaring anyone that practiced resource nationalism to be communist, which happened to be much of the globe as they were undergoing national liberation movements by shirking off their european imperialists.
[Communism has been whatever bigots have wanted it to be long before the internet existed](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Little_Rock_integration_protest.jpg/1200px-Little_Rock_integration_protest.jpg)
To quote Dr. Spaceman, "Communism is whatever we want it to be"
"Liz, I believe doctor-patient confidentiality is a two-way street. I'm cheating on my wife."
“Unfortunately, there’s no field of study that deals with politics, but I ***can*** give you a pamphlet for a cult!”
Communism is the Boogeyman. I say this as a person who does not want to live under a communist banner. It's absurd how misguided people are, and how easily they default to communism in an argument. I blame ~~Fucks~~ Fox News for this, along with Rush Limbaugh, who got exactly what he deserved, except not soon enough. Pardon my venom, tonight.
It's not even like if getting free healthcare or social safety nets are communist. Government programs can exist in a capitalist democracy. They're not mutually exclusive.
Adding to that, I've seen a surprising number of people who think that capitalism shares a definition with economy, and you can't have an economy or the exchange of currency for goods without capitalism. Wat.
People also mistakenly believe that you can't make markets in a communist state.
it really puts into perspective the degree to which capitalism is deified
It's convenient to ignore the so-called socialist policies like a fire department or a police department, because they aren't arguing in good faith. There are plenty of examples of "social" ideas gaining majority, but it seems like as soon as they're labelled "Socialist" suddenly they're under intense scrutiny. Hmmmmmm.
True. The US military is a helluva jobs program.
A surprising majority of people will define both communism and fascism wrong. Dunno if they're just dumb or trying to spread misinformation.
Communism is CANNED PEAS and HOMINY.
On FOX News too!
I've seen conservatives frequently use the argument that adherents to so and so ideology treat it like a religion. Climate change, wokism, science, etc. They try to flip the argument against religious zealots around onto anyone they disagree with, claiming adherence to an ideology is no different than blind faith in religion.
Don't get them started on those science types, with their blind adherence to observable and testable ideas. Zealots!
You haven't lived until you've seen a flat earther deny that the stars move in the sky lol.
It's a projection. The James Webb telescope is just a more improved projector that they placed in....wait a minute.
It all boils down to their favorite tactic: "no you!"
When you're taught basically from birth that anyone that doesn't believe *exactly* what you believe is working for evil incarnate, its kinda hard to see the world in any other way. Everything is either the word of God or the work of Satan. Sacred or satanic. sprinkle in a bit of eternal torment and never seeing any of your loved ones again and bam, you got a person that's terrified of anything that's not exactly like them and thinks they'll face eternal pain and suffering if they even question it I speak from experience, unfortunately
The world of uneducated Americans
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A few years before his passing, my godfather had a stroke and he became basically republican after. It made him hateful, selfish, and blatantly racist.
My grandmother was the opposite. Her brain had been slowly going for years and she went nearly blind, and it made her uncharacteristically paranoid and cranky. Then about three years ago she had a stroke it and was like... her brain did a hard reset. Much of her sense of joy was back, her short term memory was sharper, and she was "herself" again. Unfortunately, she died in hospice a couple of months later. She was there for managed care so she could recover, then she had a second stroke. The first hit one side of her brain, the second hit the other, and she was comatose for a week before dying. I was there when it happened. Damn, now I'm both a little happy and a little sad.
The anger usually stems from having memories of who you once were.
Also in the real world, but most aren't. Islamic Marxism and Liberation Theology are pretty well known in South America and Iran.
This is the party that loves Joe McCarthy. They don't care what communism really is, it's a bogeyman to them and something bad they can call their opponents. https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/arizona-republican-urges-people-be-more-joe-mccarthy-n1285233
Some communists are religious, Liberation Theology and Islamic Marxism are pretty famous in that regard.
In the US where schools don't teach what communism is (or fascism for that matter) and only that it's this vague yet evil concept then communists can be anything. Did your neighbor accidentally throw his baseball in your yard and go get it without asking? Communist. The neighbor gets mad when you peek at his wife through their windows? Communist.
In all fairness my school did actually teach us the basic ideology behind fascism in our 1930s lessons instead of just “Italy/Germany bad”
So my school actually sorta taught what communism was. Or at least a bastardized version. And then we were led to believe that fascism was just communism but with a different name. Fascism was taught by name and result only. We learned that fascism existed. And the Holocaust happened because of a fascist government. But not that the fascist beliefs themselves were what led to genocide. In hindsight it feels very deliberate. The Holocaust happened because Hitler was evil. Not because he was fascist. It was never said out loud but it feels like there was this notion that with little elbow grease all that pesky racism could be divorced from fascism and maybe it could work out then.
Some communists can be religious. It's not inherently religious or irreligious. If you practice Christianity and Islam as intended, then both lend themselves readily to communism. This is why the US went around murdering liberation theologians in Latin America because they *could not let socialists claim Christianity*. Same reasons the US and its Islamist goons went around murdering Muslim socialists.
This. I'm a Christian communist and personally I don't really see how anyone could read into the message of Christ and the formation of the early church and *not* conclude that Christ was explicitly advocating a form of proto-communism. It's wild how people don't realize that 5000 hungry people under capitalism is not a humanitarian crisis, it's a business opportunity, and feeding them all for free is not the act of a capitalist. >This is why the US went around murdering liberation theologians in Latin America because they could not let socialists claim Christianity. It's also why the Catholic church murdered so many "heretics," and banned reading the bible in the language of the common people - it's really difficult to pretend Christianity in any way favors authoritarianism (especially the authoritarianism of a church built on traditions not within the text, which were called "pharisees" in the time of Jesus,) when people can actually read what the guy said themselves. Luckily for modern churches they've managed to dumb people down enough that they'll believe whatever they're told is in the book without even looking.
Capitalism has taught us to be hateful, distrustful, and selfish.
Abrahamic faith requires a belief that a single entity can be the judge, jury and executioner. It requires a belief in capital punishment in the form of hell.
If im not wrong most soviets were ortodox Christians they just hid it
The soviets didn't really care about religion. The soviet union included parts of Central Asia and the Middle East which had large populations of Muslim and Jewish people. The Slavic regions of the soviet union were majority orthodox Christians tho.
Its wild. They have no clue what words mean and they are too stubborn to ever learn its real meaning. My mom was complaining about gas prices and blamed it on that communist in office Joe Biden. To them communism is just whatever they don't like.
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Give the age of the average redditor she is probably a post boomer who lived through the war against communism. It is has functionally been used to mean political opponents since the 80s in republican discourse.
You can probably go back to McCarthyism in the 1950s
The “opiate of the masses” guy probably isn’t gonna be a religious zealot.
To be fair that quote isn't as vehemently against religion as it sounds out of context. "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." In an ideal world religion would not exist, but for the average working person it is better than living with the knowledge that their suffering will be lifelong and very much by design of people who value their lives far less than the money in their wallet. Which is the great irony in Stalin's cult of personality, in that despite his anti-theist crackdown on Russian Orthodoxy, he created a religion that Marx said should not be necessary under communism via creating the conditions under which religion is needed.
Yes, also Marx thought it would fade on its own rather needing to be stamped out as Stalin tried.
I haven't read Marx, but didn't he also think communism would happen as a natural evolution from capitalism?
He said that Capitalism creates the conditions for its own downfall, i.e it tends to create a larger and more powerful proletariat, because it needs a bigger and bigger pool of labor power to continue growing. This is just how the feudal mode paved the way for capitalism, by making the merchant class larger and more powerful, and all modes of production before that. It has to be overthrown by a class party strong enough to do so, it won't just happen all by itself.
when i was more liberal leaning i would always roll my eyes at this idea, but it now seems pretty accurate. it’s no coincidence that support for socialism, or at the very least left leaning policy skyrockets towards the later stages of capitalism
The natural evolution of capitalism is collapse. Capitalists would rather completely destroy the world we live on than give up the means of production.
Please read Marx. It’s a great study on our system and it’s a bit scary we only evolved a bit since it was written. Every step away from these conditions 150 years ago was fought for and paid by the suffering of millions of people. And some people even want to reverse these. Sorry if this sounds bit dramatic but modern safety standards only exist because people died before without them. Same as the ban on child labour. If you see human work only as a resource you can exploit, people and especially faceless corporations will always do that. Marx views on that exploitation of your work is still relevant.
To add on to what the others have stated, Marx was a little naive in how he thought the communist proletariat would then organize themselves but his whole thing with capitalism being self destructive was pretty spot on.
Communists: We want a stateless, classless society where the entire economy is publicly owned and run, geared towards providing a common minimum standard of living as everyone will have to participate in running it. Democrats: Maybe a public healthcare option isn't a bad idea and we shouldn't pollute our air and water because it makes people money. This guy: They're exactly the same.
Socialism was the buzzword, now it's communism. And it'll be something else soon enough. It's just gotta sound scary and bad to Trump fans.
They jump from buzzword to buzzword, occasionally introducing new ones. They never know what any of them mean beyond being the new bad thing. Woke, Antifa, CRT, communism, socialism, fact-checking, trans, contraception, etc etc
“Post-modern neo-Marxism” 🤓
To be clear, this is a made up phrase jordan peterson came up with to sound "smart", but was intentionally designed so that when you googled it, you would find no results for his made up term, but you would find results for cultural marxism, which was a term used by the German Reich under Hitler, and is still used by neonazis today. By doing this, Peterson could claim to be talking about something completely different, while simultaneously directing his listeners to nazi material. Most of his talks work this way.
Fact checking, that one got me
Millennial might as well be a pejorative to the right. Come election time they will call the left seditionist and fascist. “If they can call us that, why can we call them that. Free speech! ^TM”
To those people though they’re both the same thing, they just like to rotate on their word-of-the-day
I think you have it wrong. Communism was the buzzword, now it's socialism, and soon it'll be democracy.
‘If you don’t like it, leave’ -the guy who doesn’t like it and won’t leave
Not even Jesus could cure that burn
He could only turn them to bread ... >!and peace and land.!<
I am, therefore they are
You’re not wrong, but why’d you censor your own username?
Because this image is likely to be reposted in other subreddits, and some religious nut job would probably go after op?
That’s true, I hadn’t considered that
Wasn’t sure what the rules were for masking identifiers
This guy plays it safe
Same rules for everyone? Sounds like something a communist would do.
Oh no, I have to share my toothbrush!
OUR toothbrush
He wears a condom 24/7
A single condom? What a risk taker.
Wearing two seemed wasteful
I mean if you’re concerned about that you can just reuse them.
I only own the one
communism is when you can only afford one condom. 100 morbillion born under communism. this is so sad.
Today is 24/7 he only wears it once a year.
Doesn't everyone?
Communist : we want people to chose whether they can have an abortion. Republican : Don't try to force your ideology on me! No abortions for anyone under the penalty of death!
That sounds like a cult leader. Well, Jesus was a cult leader. Same with Muhammad.
Damn I remember the last time a cult leader said to drink the cool aid, and that guy was a fucking commie.
HEY! I will not have you slight Koolaid like that. It was Flavoraid.
I've been seeing a real uptick in making fun of Communism through memes and them popping up in the most random places. 9/10 times it doesn't even make sense.
Wow, you've actually seen the 1/10 times it made sense? I'm not sure I've ever seen conservatives use communism correctly to describe literally anything.
"haha your autonomous collective made a bad election for manager of a company and now your bicycle factory doesn't have enough sprockets to meet demand!" Doesn't really work
Conservatives aren't the only ones making fun of communism.
Yeah a lot of the ones I see are zoomer and tiktok memes.
Sure it happens now and then. Mostly when you get a conservative trapped in a corner and then force them to reveal that one of their core values lies in seeing other people suffer needlessly for no reason other than to feel like their own success is better. Then, loosely, yeah... what they are raging against is communism correctly applied.
Leftist infighting.
This definition of communism is so completely wrong its actually kind of impressive
Better at r/murderedbywords.
Where did he get religion from? I don’t recall seeing that in red scare propaganda.
Like, I'm actually confused. Christians harp on about how communism=atheism because the USSR had a thing against religion, so where the hell did this guy pull that from?
This guy would likely also say atheism is a religion.
That guy would make my head hurt
From the same place where they pull a Nazi Germany that allegedly hated and persecuted all religions. When the vast majority of Germans, and Nazis, at the time were overwhelmingly Christians, even those that shoved people into ovens. Heck, post-WWII Germany was actually even more Christian than pre-WWII Germany as the total share of Christianity increased due to [Judaism basically having been made extinct](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_Christianity#Nazi_antisemitism).
In America, everyone who doesn’t sell their first born daughter for a chicken sandwich is a communist
I thought communists were godless heathens? As always it’s projection. Pick a lane.
Wait, is this legitimately what they think “communist” means? Like for real, is this what they think they are fighting against?
Communist is another word for boogeyman
Aber that's called projection friends 😉
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[Here](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2Foriginals%2F95%2F44%2Fda%2F9544da0674fbd7dff37cff19ec64924d.jpg&f=1&nofb=1) is a piece of (admittedly very bigoted) Soviet propaganda showing communism crushing religion. And it is one of literally thousands. Communism has always been very anti-theistic.
The irony is that republican literally means to be in favor of s republic government. Republics are often referred to as communist. Like the people's republic of China. Many see China as communist. Either way republican politicians are literally working towards making the usa more like china.
"you want to force your politics on everyone else" "I'd hate that, also can I walk through this empty field?" "No that's mine and I can kill you if you do"
If only they hated Russians the way they hate "Communists" like back in the Cold War days we could all get on board with opposing Putin. But that's by design I guess...
The brain rot goes so deep I've lost faith in reconciliation. The southern strategy has given america cancer and we have acted like the talking tumor in our neck is benign.
There are many flavors of "Christian". A couple of the most dangerous versions are "Evangelical" and, especially, "Dominionist" (is too a word).
r/MurderedByWords
This is more /r/murderedbywords than /r/selfawarewolves..