IS SOCIALISM SLAVERY?

[White Beard]

not even sure what 'cultural marxism' is.

from reading up on it, it sounds like just a catchy label to put on left leaning ideas in general but with a conspiracy theory nutter twist.

It’s the new totalitarian elite term for courtesy - yes, the simple gestures of respect and consideration with which members of a civilized society lubricate the workings of society and civilization.

Replaces “political correctness”

 

[Gry]

Pretty sure he missed them, too: he claims he listens to no one, makes up his own mind, but he clearly has only absorbed the bullshit in the air around him. I believe him when he talks about his wife, his family, himself, but when he talks about anything else, he makes it painfully clear that he’s ignorant of it all. He doesn’t grasp the *concepts* of morals and morality, or politics, or economics - or even words, for that matter.

But hot DAMN, he does BELIEVE the tropes he’s swallowed whole, and he wields them like an angry child with a box of hammers. I’m no fan of Socrates, but the Greek spin doctor was right about one thing: the unexamined life is not worth living...at least, for the people within earshot of it.

Those behind the Powell Memo would hold him up as a demonstration that their efforts were successful.

 

[White Beard]

Those behind the Powell Memo would hold him up as a demonstration that their efforts were successful.

Oh, the Powell memo...more of that “fake stuff” that never happened, I remember. So much “fake stuff“ harassing our poor patriots, they can’t see reality rolling straight for them. Sucks to be us.

 

[shaggyballs]

Trump will put an end to it all just re elect him.

Trump is this nation hero!

Vote for trump he is the best choice.

 

[St. Phatty]

owning a $750,000 pillbox on a city lot ... spending 2 or more hours a day in commute traffic.

you don't need a jail with bars - people pay for their own Jail ! ! !

sign a mortgage for $600K and then they HAVE to have a job to pay the $3000 monthly mortgage payment.

the corporate America vision for most employees = Slavery.

the government corporate jobs = Socialism + Slavery, same for the military contractor jobs & other jobs financed by gov. $$

 

[Klompen]

Seems like a lot of people are intent on making us decide between corporate masters and government masters. If ever the Middle Way was needed, that time is now.

 

[kickarse]

I'll have guess

YES it is, surprised any one didn't know, and had to ask

read a history book ?

 

['Boogieman']

owning a $750,000 pillbox on a city lot ... spending 2 or more hours a day in commute traffic.

you don't need a jail with bars - people pay for their own Jail ! ! !

sign a mortgage for $600K and then they HAVE to have a job to pay the $3000 monthly mortgage payment.

the corporate America vision for most employees = Slavery.

the government corporate jobs = Socialism + Slavery, same for the military contractor jobs & other jobs financed by gov. $$

Going to work to pay for what you want is not slavery it's a choice and most people want to make that choice. You could get a 150k house paid off in no time if you want it's all about choices. If someone doesn't want to work for someone else they can start a business and work for themselves.

 

[GYOweed]

You're paid what people are willing to pay you.

 

[White Beard]

You're paid what people are willing to pay you.

And if it’s not enough you take several jobs, or hold out for a better offer, or...not all choices are equal: the people with money are the ones with choices, the rest of us take what’s available and make do as best we can. I am worth $130/hour...but realistically, I either take less and get more work, or I hold out for my rate and get less work. Trade-offs like that are seriously damaging.

In order to *truly* have choice in the job market, you either work for family, work for friends, or take whatever you can get & stretch it as far as you can.

 

['Boogieman']

And if it’s not enough you take several jobs, or hold out for a better offer, or...not all choices are equal: the people with money are the ones with choices, the rest of us take what’s available and make do as best we can. I am worth $130/hour...but realistically, I either take less and get more work, or I hold out for my rate and get less work. Trade-offs like that are seriously damaging.

In order to *truly* have choice in the job market, you either work for family, work for friends, or take whatever you can get & stretch it as far as you can.

Or you can leave the south and go somewhere that actually has opportunities available. My dad charges 100$ an hour as a plumbing contractor in the midwest and business is booming.

 

[Gry]

Or you can leave the south and go somewhere that actually has opportunities available. My dad charges 100$ an hour as a plumbing contractor in the midwest and business is booming.

At some point in life, you will come to find out that your pop is a very
unusual man, and that you were blessed to be able to follow him.

 

[GYOweed]

And if it’s not enough you take several jobs, or hold out for a better offer, or...not all choices are equal: the people with money are the ones with choices, the rest of us take what’s available and make do as best we can. I am worth $130/hour...but realistically, I either take less and get more work, or I hold out for my rate and get less work. Trade-offs like that are seriously damaging.

In order to *truly* have choice in the job market, you either work for family, work for friends, or take whatever you can get & stretch it as far as you can.

Thanks for *truly* speaking for everyone and myself with your doomed mentality.
I never worked for friends or family.
"I am worth $130/hour...but realistically" exactly.

You're worth what people are willing to pay you.
Change my mind.

 

[Veggia farmer]

why is there all this antisemitism? always from conspiracy theory nut types... like if ppl really believe the illuminati are un control crapola, and believe they happen to be jewish, why do ppl then hate on all jewish ppl?

like don't get me wrong, i hate religion just as much as the next guy but i don't hate all the practitioners, i see them as victims; no need to victimize them further.

fuck nick cannon

On my farm I often get cows or sheeps from other farmers on my side of the fence. Its still the farmer responsibility and I still say F*^"# COWS! The animals are just victims of human games, but...

 

[Amynamous]

On my farm I often get cows or sheeps from other farmers on my side of the fence. Its still the farmer responsibility and I still say F*^"# COWS! The animals are just victims of human games, but...

I think i’d be calling them Sunday dinner, but that’s just me.

 

[h.h.]

Or you can leave the south and go somewhere that actually has opportunities available. My dad charges 100$ an hour as a plumbing contractor in the midwest and business is booming.

Now do you.

 

[Digit]

"Socialism" Which characteristics thereof, are definitive?

How about starting with the most important which is what is being missed by so many. FORCE is the underlying "characteristic" ....not sure if "characteristic" is necessarily the right word to be used here in this particular sentence, but good enough methinks

FORCE is what differentiates socialism from freedom. You WILL pay x amount, you WILL you WILL you WILL. you WILL obey or else.

Voluntary....hahahaha

that's what i like about the distinct difference between, anarcho-socialism and authoritarian socialism.

we need not tie ourselves to just 1 dimension and then try fold other dimensions into that linear conception.

if we take an earlier offered definition for the word, socialism being the transitional condition between capitalism and communism, then in a sense we see this as only referring to economics. we can take this economics line, and at 90 degrees draw another line, measuring everybodys(?[1]) freedom (or lack thereof), teasing out the differences between a libertarian socialism[2], and an authoritarian socialism. .... et viola, the political compass.

the libertarian forms of socialism are more born of, and maintained by, a sufficiently commonly held understanding that, as (at least) one political philosopher put it (albeit hastily paraphrased by me): my freedom depends on your freedom.

as in, enlightened self interest.

not an imposition by the self appointed enlightened upon the proclaimed subhumans or whatever other tankie[4] nonsense that reveals itself riddled with hypocrisy and contradiction. as much as capitalism does, with it's grand self marketing as great for freedom and efficiency (now since shown to offer neither ~ David Graeber's books are a good intro here, if you're not yet familiar with these two claims of capitalism not being true).

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bullshit. are you paying taxes "voluntarily", or are you paying them because you do not want to go to jail, lose your job/house/family? if force is what differentiates "freedom" from "socialism", then we are already a socialist country. anyone out there that hates "socialism" that refused to cash their stimulus check? won't drive on public roads? hypocrites...

this reminds again of the orwellian hole we're in, where the people from one part of the world have one meaning for a word, and people from another part, have another meaning, and barely an overlap between the two on the edge of a venn diagram.

yes, if defining socialism as antithesis to freedom, then job well done. but i dont think we're much past tautological affirmations at that point.

if we consider again,
not the nazi kind of "socialism", nor stalinist, no, not authoritarian,
but a more bakunin kind, anarcho/libertarian socialism.
how would we structure things... would we have taxes? if we did, would they be egregious impositions? would we have say in what they're spent on, and scrutiny, and even means to opt out? would we rearrange economics so none suffer the psychelogical sting seeing a portion of their resources be taken (& even without legitimate representation)? would we continue the manufactured scarcities? how might we re-organize resource synergies, when we have the freedom (oft touted from usa voices as a purely capitalist trait (lol[7])), and the enlightened self interest, to help all.

and then consider even further, in a kropotkin sense... when it's everybody's responsibility, each of us... how willing would we be to disregard our duties, compared to the externalities prone predicament we find ourselves in with our authoritarian right wing corporatist-stooge governments towing the central banking line? how much value would we each be willing to permit lost by the likes of, e.g. stock traders (whom i heard destroy $7 of value for every $1 they extract from the economy/markets), once we're all fully informed and fully empowered to apply remedy?

but try tell someone with a mcarthian redscare hangover about the autonomy and sovereignty of the individual in the socio-economic systems on the freedom side of marx[8]. no, really, please do try. much to unlearn. much to mend.

when you're being hozed of every penny, and more, by the friends of those who enslave and extort you, under the false promise that the money will go to services and things for you, and protection from those enslavers/extortionists by regulation, and you see it's just those same circle of friends in the regulators, turning them to deregulators, so you just go deeper into enslavement by rents and other means... "taxes" seem egregious. and rightly so. that is egregious. if you had means of remedy over that, n could get rid of the extortion, prevent the revolving doors and conflicts of interest, a system eliminating and preventing such corruption, rather than nepotistically built on it... then maybe you could be in a place where you've ample abundance, no stress, and are therefor more easily happy to chip in to help maintain things nice for everybody. no psychological sting anymore. no oligarchs. no slavery.

i'm already concerned i'm taking this too far for much of the likely audience here, but... i'm still pussy footing in the shallows. what we'd really do with a system designed to benefit everybody, surely, would be to (safely, carefully) unleash the many suppressed emancipatory technologies (of which there are THOUSANDS). when a wealth-extraction-maximising entity gets big enough to buy the rule makers, it buys rules that benefit it. including what new technologies get to come out. ... so if a new technology comes out that would disrupt their wealth-extraction-maximisation, they quash it. any number of means. assassinating inventors is just the most sensationalist means this has been accomplished over the decades. many times, it's just done with the patent system. and no, not just the upfront patents that they sit on, and they buy extensions to, perpetually, so no one can bring them to market, but also the secreted patents, so no one gets to know. ... except maybe a few patent examiners... of which there's at least one who's calling out the scam, having seen energy/power devices be secreted over 3000 times. it's clearly not all secreting for our benefit by a benevolent paternal system. clearly, a huge portion of it, is to maintain the wealth-extraction dominance of the monopolists. yay, go capitalism. *baulk*. so efficient. we're so free. bollocks.

and yet... because of the orwellian language differences... these anti-freedom traits of capitalism are proclaimed as communism and socialism creeping in, by those lacking a broader political vocabulary to tease out the authoritarianism they mean from the redscare, and in that conflation and redscare, unaware of that bakunin corner/quote[6], that's worth repeating/re-reading to really grok it.

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(amusingly, yesterday i saw again young sheldon s02e15 (or was it s02e16...) where in his dry half-brain hyper-logic integrity and blinkered naivety, suggested to 1980s texas, moving to a more socialist/communist system. HA! ouch. ~ yeah, i'm not without awareness n sympathy for how tricky that is for many to deal with... even over 3 decades on from the berlin wall coming down.)

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You're paid what people are willing to pay you.

n imagine what we'd be willing to pay each other with each our own currencies, to complement the collective currency used, that we'd also have control over production of, and therefor secondarily (to a large extent) the buying power of. ... sry, ok, i'm definitely taking this too far for folks now (myself included, lol). idk if that's like some kind of neo-keynsian fantasy or wat.

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i'm still keen to see what kind of "socialism" can be born when the ayn rands and the emma goldmans of the world put aside their differences to collaborate on a freedomwards midpoint.

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okies, that's [more than] enough. those who most need to, dont read these long replies. keep the faif[9].

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[1]~ maybe not everybody's... that may splay out another difference between (economic)left-free and (economic)right-free, where on the right you're more free to be not free... free to enslave... and there's its drift from freedom to tyranny. contrast to the left's ideological fervency that'd lead them from anarcho-communists/anarcho-socialists/libertarian-socialists/etc, drifting up to become tankies. each side has its own distinct epic fail potential.

[2] i get that in usa, this is a particularly difficult concept to grok, given how the terms are abused. long time abused. how many decades was there that mcarthian redscare nonsense conflating all left as the same devil tyrant, and how long as the usa conception of libertarian been all but wholly owned by the ayn rand corner? combine both these flaws, n you end up hiding the kropotkin/bakunin/emmagoldman/graeber/chomsky[3] corner. ... the corner with both freedom and socialism.[6]

[3] hesitated to include that last name. ever been on the fence with him, oft catching authoritarian flies cleverly hiding in his slow dribbling ointment.

[4] i saw someone struggle with that term recently. think of it like "send in the tanks" to "free" those who are not yet doing it the correct way, your way, the supreme leader's way, forcing homogeneous group-think[5] n all that bollocks.

[5] no free thought allowed. ... #notmyleft.

[6] as neatly encapsulated in: "Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice. Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality." -- Bakunin.

[7] i laugh, because, of course, that's nonsense. "you can make it too if you become a worthy vampire and buy the right lottery ticket to pull yourself up by your bootstraps." ha! just a way of blaming the victim, and creating victim co-perpetrators, deepening the "tragedy of the commons" hole.. ... methinks i shud go read confessions of an economic hitman (again? idk if i ever did).

[8] fuck marx. not a fan. almost as much as not a fan of thatcher. each disregarded the other political dimension, "no such thing as society" as thatcher put it. so marx already taking a wrong turn away from bakunin to where he famously resides on the political compass, instead of turning kropotkinwards, and in so doing, paved the way for the tankies, slipping through lenin, trotsky, to stalin. similar to how thatcher paved the way to the "neo-liberal" (not new, not liberal) shitshow we have currently, hugging dangerously close to a pinnochet area of the political compass, e.g. with the mainstay of brexiteers and the more gleefully racist corner of drumpff support, seemingly largely oblivious, not witting, to the political philosophy of those they support, despite it harming them too. so fuckem [marx[ists] [and thatcher[ites]]]. their ignorance and arrogance, make them unbefitting of considering taking aboard their political philosophies, less for what was in them, more for what was left out, and what (tyranny-trajectory) they allowed to happen in that omission.

[9] free as in freedom.

 

[h.h.]

On my farm I often get cows or sheeps from other farmers on my side of the fence. Its still the farmer responsibility and I still say F*^"# COWS! The animals are just victims of human games, but...

Colorado is a free range state. It’s not my responsibility, at least legally, to keep my animals in. It’s your responsibility to keep them out.
Darn commies.

 

[h.h.]

Pull yourself up by your bootstraps....an impossibility

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pull...ootstraps-nonsense_n_5b1ed024e4b0bbb7a0e037d4

 

[Veggia farmer]

Colorado is a free range state. It’s not my responsibility, at least legally, to keep my animals in. It’s your responsibility to keep them out.
Darn commies.

I think you misunderstood. Look further. People are hypocrites. Me included.

I think we are more alike then you see yourself at this point. Peace mate