why is it weird? “socialist” regimes trade globally as much and probably even more so since so many are petrol-stans, that crank out billionaires for the forbes list at highly over represented rates. i mean it may be weird to you because you only think of socialism as collective farming.
we have a good way of curbing the billionaire club. it’s called taxes. we should use that tool instead of shutting down trade.
So a socialist is arguing that free markets are partly irrelevant to and partly a way to improve political and institutional corruption and failure?
(Edit - I guess I always assume socialism is state ownership of the nation’s wealth production, but I suppose it doesn’t mean much any more.)
fu jt you know this shit doesn’t go itt
There’s a lot in this post and we’re way outside of my areas of core knowledge, but afaik meat consumption is one of the main drivers of deforestation on a global level, and we could easily feed the world with our existing agricultural land if we fed the grain and corn to people rather than to animals to make meat.
This seems obvious enough to my reptilian brain that I have drastically curbed meat consumption and not bothered to learn too much more in recent years.
Of course, the world strictly adhering to vegetarianism immediately would not be good either. Developing countries count on raising livestock in small scales. But that’s a hell of a lot different from what we do in the US.
Going to be an extra long 8 days if we all have to suffer through 200+ post derails daily until the election.
derail literally went, gmo bad → environment is hurting → capitalism bad → africa should grow their own collectively.
with that much spanning, if you are not conflating too many issues into one bucket, you are probably doing marxism a disservice.
re: guns. of course guns kill people and access to guns kills people. but we are going to live in a world where every 3d printer can make a gun in about five minutes. if you think you need to curb the technology, you are wasting a lot of time and effort. i would focus on teaching people to handle them safely, mandating storage in unloaded state, limiting how many guns and ammo a person can hold on to, and adding charges to crimes with unregistered guns. beyond that i’ll defer to people smarter than me.
markets need to be partly regulated and partly free. most western markets fit the description although issues like bubbles/crashes/child labor/pollution probably mean they are under-regulated. does that answer your question?
IMHO state ownership is much closer to communism than socialism, although nothing stops anyone from claiming that they are or not socialist. (see my screenname).
every state’s military is socialism (state monopoly on violence funded entirely by taxes for the “good” of the country). every department of transportation is socialism. public schools are socialism. social security is socialism. agriculture subsidies is socialism. government courts for corporate bankruptcies are a form of socialism. we can play this game all day.
How about no.
norman borlaug is a hero. i sincerely hope you are in the minority on this.
Quite possibly the person that eased the most human suffering in the history of humans. Actually, change “quite possibly” to “almost certainly”.
Henry A. Wallace
The hooray science people immediately accuse anyone with any doubt about any technology in any situation of being brainless absolutist zealots. It’s always projection with you people.
This doesn’t sound right. Science and technology aren’t the same thing. Burning oil to generate energy is technology. Observing the impact on climate is science. These things are not harmonious.
This is a critical distinction in these discussions.
Literally every concern any of you have about agribusiness, GMOs, the environment, sustainability, etc. is a thing the guys in labcoats have been worrying about for decades.
To be fair, its hard to practice science without technology, and its hard to build powerful technology without science.
This sounds right to me. It’s the people in business suits we need to worry about.
And other people in lab coats are doing things like developing new ways to frack. It’s not Johnny who is being an absolutist. It’s you.
We all agree Monsanto is extremely evil, right? No one’s going to try to justify selling seeds for crops that don’t bear seeds are they? Or crops that need a special chemical to unlock?
I read about these things but it’s been a while and I could be remembering wrong.