The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

By definition, the country's leadership taking control of all resources and commerce, and directing it themselves.

Opposed to Socialism, which is the country redistributing the resources and commerce, from wealthier citizens, onto more impoverish citizens.

Democratic Socialism, for instance, is what most of Europe boasts about practice. It's essentially the system the US uses, but more resources, and the government provides less goods and services for those resources.

Those are just surface level definitions of what it is - policy output descriptors. None describe the why. The discussion is useless on that level because the apologist simply has to utter that infamously naive statement "that wasn't real communism".

Since he seems to know all about communism, I want colin to state and define it's core philosophical precepts.

I love how you guys are saying you get history from statues

I know you love yourself so much, but why did you refer to yourself as "you guys"?

Because I know you weren't talking to me. I listed an in-depth understanding of history, and various reasons why we don't disavow the military service and sacrifices of historical figures, because we want to call them a lot more racist than they actually were, and then make anyone born in their general region also sound a lot more racist than they actually are.

Nazis are racist. You hate them? So do i. I really hate and fully disagree with nazis. What they believe, are destructive, impractical, and selfish. I'm not a nazi. You don't care, you define me as a Nazi, then you hate me. Cool story, it pisses me the **** off though, you're just looking for puppies to kick and throats to cut. Just like Antifa.

Find REAL nazis to pick fights with. Be very sure when you vandalize a car or assault with a weapon, that the target is in fact a nazi. If you're even remotely wrong, then it's actually an innocent you just assaulted.

Generally, since I look both ways when I cross a one-way street, I don't trust a mob to make that ruling. The evil **** a Nazi does that pisses you off so much, is already illegal pretty much everywhere. Murder, assault, theft, and civil rights violations as per the the constitutional amendment. You can prosecute them by law, you don't have to smash their windows dammit.

I reckon, if you have to try that very hard to make someone out to be a nazi, and then it's still arguable, and you have to break windows in the name of justice.... then your target is probably not an actual nazi. There is no such thing as a nice nazi, that nazi would be breaking the law if he were a nazi.

I'd imagine the "why" is literally because "being successful is okay, twice the work is worth twice the rewards, ten times the work is worth ten times the reward". HOWEVER, half the work is getting some people hundreds of times the reward, and when people get pissed, they either take ninety times the reward back from them, or they take a guillotine and... honestly, when people are starving while others are gorging, what did you expect?

Communist nations that go about suppressing their people and micromanaging their freedoms, those are just awful. We all know that.

Modern Germany, it's a social-democracy, and it's honestly not that bad. Had one guy want me to censor a photo on another forum I moderate that had a swastika on a game-texture screenshot, happened to know the posting user being an actual practicing libertarian campaign funding manager. Contacted the user letting them know I censored the image because it wasn't a massively contributing part of the picture anyway, I just blurred it really. User said it was okay, it was an image he found and just happened to have swastikas on the texture-swaps in the photo, he was too lazy to remove them but didn't intentionally look for one with swastikas. I did remind the German guy that the content isn't a violation unless it's in support of nazis, and since the texture-swap was an enemy-sprite you actively shoot in the game, I'd argue it was probably not supportive.

what is this? third grade? : D


how can someone refer oneself with the term "you"? let's send you back to third grade for a do-over.

Rude bro

You get just 1 stuck up elitist like Tatsu in the US Dept. of Education, and this happens. "hur dur let's perpetually stick adults in 3rd grade despite merits because I think it's funny".

This is why you might as well not have one. It was literally formed in the 80s, and that was literally when the US plummeted out of pole-position for education systems globally.

Adults, only exist to **** other adults over apparently. You pick a group of people with which you have a bone to pick, and make policy so toxic, that you damn the entire country, in the process of just trying to pull a sick joke over on them.

US politics, in a nutshell. It's essentially "Pokemon Go", choose to join Team Mystic, Team Valor, or Team Instinct, and pick random fights at arbitrary gym locations. What metagame, such plot, wow.

you're not having fun? stop hating on politics go! it's a really good game ok?

I can get behind the concept that old people don't compare the world accurately to theirs. No sense of converting costs and values for inflation. No sense of how the average employment has changed. No sense of how they treat modern technology like they forgot their own new technologies when growing up.

Nobody said all whites are racist, @thetrophysystem

I recommend working on that projection

A word that references a lot of different interpretations of various ideas that all could be more or less summarized with the concept that property is owned by the community and everyone gets what they need and provides what they can to the community.

Which, considering you think taxes are equivalent to stealing, sure must seem like the devil itself to you.

I do remember that this is a circle back by 100+ pages though. We've had this topic somewhere around somebody going "but Sanders is a socialist".

We can do on a more abstract level though: Communism deals mainly with economics and how to fairly distribute wealth.
Nazism isn't about economics. It's about racial superiority.

That's basically all you need to know to figure out that Nazis are worse than Communists. Doesn't matter how bad the results of attempts of communistic governments have been in the past.

I mean if we play like that we probably should start pointing fingers at Capitalism. The number of people who died because of greed for money is probably gonna dwarf the number of people killed by Communists and Nazis combined.

False. As is true with any multi-billion unit projections, it's simply not true. SOMEBODY thinks all whites are racist. Plenty of people argue they all are, whether intentionally or not, they all are racist at some point and time. Like they do it with haircuts or with the movies they watch or what brands they buy.

Which is the most assanine problem with claims of racism. Haircuts, are hard pressed to be racist. Symbols cut into hair can, but the entire US Military by default isn't racist, and a white wearing dreads isn't racist. Mayonnaise isn't racist either, Patrick Star, neither by choice of diet nor by brand.

People AREN'T automatically racist by being of a race themselves, the very notion is racist, which brings me to my next point. Black people can be racist toward whites. Not all of them, not even most of them, no, it'd be racist toward blacks, to think they were all racist toward all whites. Some are though, by the very notion that they think all whites are scary.

If a white person sees a black person and automatically perceives increased chances of threat, they're racist. If a black person sees a white person and perceives the same increased chance of threat, that it influences their social actions toward whites, then they're pretty narrow-minded too. There's no reason to assume all of everyone is going to wrong you based on their skin color. Some whites are racist, not all of them, and not all of them by relation to arbitrary conservative political ideals.

It's like, "irony racism", where someone considers all of a race racist. It doesn't matter if those people are diverse, charitable, sociable, and liberal. Which is where I am right now, in being fed up with frivolous racism claims.

That is nothing short of naive. You haven't demonstrated an understanding of communism in the slightest, let alone why Hitler was anti-semitic and believed in a super race to begin with. Where on earth did that idea come from? Did you know that hitler also believed in fair redistribution of wealth? Why do you think he targeted those capitalist pig jews so much?

What do you suppose Hitler meant when he said,

Again, like i said to trophy, you too are merely describing certain specific government policy outputs of the ideology, but you haven't actually described the ideology yet. Even then Trophy managed to describe those economic policies in far more detail than you have managed here.

Also, if you really want to use racial superiority as a moral differentiator, then i'll give you a little sneak peak into where this is going. Karl marx, the ideological founder of marxism and it's inspired offshoots of communism and socialism.

Karl Marx, The Russian Loan

Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question

In his correspondance he frequently uses the word "******" while living in England. He refers to the jews he borrows money from as "“Jew Bamberger” or “little Jew Bamberger.” He reports about his holiday in Ramsgate 1879, that the resort contained “many Jews and fleas.” Surely a coincedence that he sounds exactly like hitler "on the jewish question".

While you have a little think about that, I'm also going to again ask you to describe what the fundamental precepts of communism are. What does communism believe and why? The reason I am pushing this with you so hard is because if you can't describe something in detail, on what solid basis do you think you are somehow capable of passing judgement of it?

How foolish. Yea, if only people beat up the nazis more in the 1930's, then hitler would never have risen to power right?

Except you forget that beating up nazis is exactly what the commies did, and Goebells in particular specialised in manipulating the violent confrontations to grow the nazi movement. About 300 people died in the year before Hitler came to power in violent conflict between the commies and the brownshirts. They both had roaming gangs of thugs wandering around looking to start something with each other.

"Look at those violent commies! Come join the National socialists instead, we're for the people of Germany! We'll defend you from these violent thugs, bullies, and jew backed russian provocateurs. We're for real socialism!".

"Look at those violent fascists crushing the worker under the boot!Come join the Commie new world order! We'll build a workers paradise together where none shall be of wanting. Stand up against your oppressors!"

One can see quite readily how the center will collapse to either side under such pressures, either resulting in an outright civil war or a landslide into political dictatorship of either side e.g. national socialist or stalinist puppet state.

The only problem with this though, is that there are at least 20 socialist governments to exemplify. Do you choose Germany, China, Cambodia, USSR, Cuba, or Yugoslavia?

Some of those were way less questionable than others, but even if you can portray them as all bad, you can portray at least 20 different Capitalist nations as bad too.

The striking things about all those socialist nations listed, is that their actual policy and actions, are widely different from one another. China practices censorship, Germany much mildly does. USSR practiced direct influence over resources and businesses and employment and rations, Germany hardly could be considered the same. I don't remember Germany killing one of it's citizens for speaking against it's central government either.

As far as capitalism goes, the regulations turn capitalism into crony capitalism real fast. You might as well make some of the specific regulations basically say "You can only manufacture pharmaceuticals if your company name is Pfizer", because that's essentially what the regulation does, there are no details in the regulation that any other company can even enter into the field. I'm not suggesting completely de-regulate capitalism, I'm saying 80% of regulations need to be liquidated.

EPA can declare thresholds and inspection methods but not enforce a level of company investment beyond "not polluting these chemicals beyond these tresholds". FDA should have sunset clauses on their subsidies, where they have to re-evaluate them every so often so they're not just grandfathered into a crop that no longer needs them. Hell, every regulation probably needs sunset-clauses, so that the government has to actively keep laws, rather than building code ontop of legacy code until there's 9 billion lines of code.

Yep, that's why I'm asking Colin to think hard and long about Communism as a fundamental ideology. The first step is knowing what the ideology says and why it believes what it believes. Then you can start talking about why communist dictators did what they did.

I'm not talking about democratic socialism, liberal democracy, or any kind of mixed platform at this stage with him. We can have that discussion once we first learn to walk. When you are learning to cook, you first learn what each ingredient tastes like and what it brings to the table by itself before you start learning how to describe ways of mixing them.

See, I can say "that's not real capitalism" because I concretely understand what capitalism is and thus can judge whether something is in the spirit of capitalism or not. Capitalism is merely a state of being where both private ownership and voluntary exchange are upheld. It's perfectly compatible with voluntary communism e.g. "The People's Commune" which holds in trust the assets of people who have voluntarily contributed to the project. In some ways, that's exactly what a publicly traded corporation is.

Now it would definitely be true for you to say that even capitalism will eventually get government creep and gradually corrupt into crony capitalism. This is true of everything. Life is a cycle of order, prosperity, corruption, chaos, rebirth. The real question you should be asking is how best to deal with this cycle. What is best suited for prosperity and continual rebirth from corruption? I would suggest to you that the answer to that is maintaining the integrity of private property and voluntary exchange, which serve as highly decentralised checks and balances.

The idea of free speech is based on these same mechanical concepts: your speech is your own, you own an exclusive right to use your mouth in a peaceful manner however you like, and no-one can coerce you to say something which you do not want. If someone happens to have a bigger than average mouth, or higher than average verbal intelligence, you don't take out a knife and "correct" his speech ability "because they have an unfair and oppressive advantage".

It is definitely not be true to say that capitalism, even crony capitalism as contemptible as it is has been anywhere near as bad as any of the "well intentioned" utopian authoritarians of the 20th century. Go look up Boris Yeltsin's visit to an American Supermarket.

On the other hand you can't say "that's not real communism" when government gets involved in actual Communism because violent class revolution and class struggle is a fundamental marxist idea. That upstart revolutionary government 'embodies the will of the people'. It's Marx's entire theory of history.

To the true commie the world is always divisible into the oppressed and the oppressors, and the only way to solve it is to create an entirely new classless world order by make everyone absolutely 100% equal through violent redress. And since people aren't 100% categorical equals, what you end up with is a violent murderous ideology that continually "prunes" its members until no-one is left alive to prune. Antifa aren't twisting communist ideology.

First it was merely about economic classless societies. But once the pursuit of that goal resulted in an undeniable charnel house of death and suffering, through sleight of hand it became about destroying qualitative distinctions between other categorical classes. For example in current times, the rise and fall of third wave feminism, it's spawning of SJWism, and the rebirth of an old, utterly contemptible equality of outcome doctrine based on lies.

Still waiting for the media to ask Trump whether he condemns antifa.