Yeah, there’s clearly a need for a line in the sand beyond which you have to find measures (I mean real ones) to prevent or disbar people from high office.
In order to protect democracy it might be necessary to sometimes ignore or override some of its worst outcomes.
I mean a huge part of me is super unhappy that they are rerunning an election… but another part of me realizes that the former part of me is glad they are rerunning this election and super unhappy that the nazis won.
Full blown fascism and communism (the authoritarian far left and far right) both have truly crazy body counts over the last 100 years. There literally isn’t a situation where they are acceptable at all. I’m not an authoritarian at all generally, but if I have to tolerate a little bit of authoritarian centrism to prevent those two I’m down with it.
I know a lot of you like to think of yourselves as communists, but I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about early Soviet/Maoist stuff here. We’d all get murdered by those people. North Korea is end stage those people. The Khmer Rouge were those people. We’re talking about the cultural revolution, stalinist purges, and all sorts of other craziness when we talk about these communists. None of it works either.
The stories of those movements is why @zarapochka starts to have a seizure when some of you start talking about revolutions lol.
2-2 reaction would depend on who was behind the rerun. If it was Trump, they would be all for it. It’s a near certainty that if Trump is re-elected, there will be calls for him to be able to run another term, these Calls will have support from a significant portion of the Republican Party, and the media will treat it like its an idea worthy of serious consideration.
Being able to revoke mandates needs to be something in the hands of the electorate in general. I don’t disagree with the idea of ad-hoc kicking out Nazis, I’m not a believer in the divine power of democracy, but let’s just make it a general case. Elected someone who makes enough of you really sad with their work, Nazi or not? Why not kick the fucker out right now?
Nixon was considering amending the constitution to allow a third term before Watergate broke, so it’s very likely Trump will if he’s still alive and not in an advanced vegetative state.
Goddammit I had a good run going with Boredsocial, hearting like a dozen of his posts with no face palming in between, and now a Commies Killed All The People post. Goddammit.
And it’s not even that Stalin and Mao weren’t killer klowns (from outer space?) but, like, capitalism fucks up entire countries for fruit and enslaves continents because hooved beasts can’t pick cotton… And gets infinite do-overs!
It’s such sophomoric nonsense.
Maoists and Stalinists aren’t people you want to advocate for. It’s a bad look. The right line to take when they get brought up is ‘no true communist’ IMO.
Seriously there’s an argument to be made that the problem with 20th century communism was that they went too early and tried to skip steps creating massive issues. That’s the argument. Don’t accidentally fall into defending the authoritarians. They were bad people. More because of the authoritarian part than the leftist part fwiw.
Basically the further you want to go on an ideological spectrum (and we are nowhere near the far left on this forum as a group… I mean saying rich people should pay sane taxes, healthcare is a human right, and we should protect the environment is not lolcommunism… that itself is a right wing talking point) the more in favor of individual liberty you also have to be as an antidote to the people who inevitably start talking about how everything would be easier if the x people didn’t exist.
FWIW, a lot of socialists think communism has more in common with capitalism than socialism, because they’re both hierarchical systems. I’d assume most of the left learners on this board lean towards socialism and that there are very few that lean towards communism.
See this is a good argument. Use this one. DO NOT DEFEND THE EARLY-MID 20th CENTURY COMMUNISTS. THEY WERE THE BADDIES, AND TO A GREATER DEGREE THAN RECENT CAPITALISTS.
That doesn’t make recent capitalism A OK because there are alternatives that are neither. Advocate for those, don’t get caught defending dumb shit reflexively.
Also, PoliSci101, nobody imagines themselves a communist here. Everybody is way down on a political-compass-style y-axis.
Eh I think there are a few people who think of themselves as communists… but I also think that they don’t really understand why that label is poisonous. I think they genuinely believe that all the bad things people say about communists are right wing propaganda… when it genuinely isn’t.
Maoism in particular is a horrific virus that societies contract when wealth inequality gets too bad and the poor start to go hungry. It’s killed more human beings than any other ideology that I’m aware of, absolutely including fascism. And before we wring our hands and pretend like that’s from last century there have been major outbreaks of maoism in India recently… and North Korea is a mature maoist state.
There are a few ideologies like Nazism and Maoism that I prefer to think of in medical terms. Right now the developed world is having a mild Nazism outbreak. The left wing version of that is Maoism and it isn’t any nicer. A core part of both ideologies is ultra violent authoritarianism. Where they go death and destruction follow. They’ve never built anything of value and the sheer amount of suffering they have caused since their inception is hard to calculate.
Basically the only time you’re going to see me go authoritarian is when there’s an outbreak of one of these ideologies. They are extremely virulent so whatever steps are required to tamp them down short of killing a bunch of people I’m generally going to be for. The only reason I’m not for killing people in one of these outbreaks is that they thrive on violence and actually want that kind of conflict to spread themselves.
Calling them killer klowns from outer spacee wasn’t meant to be a compliment.
You used the metric of a body count. I believe capitalism is soft eugenics and ‘individual liberty’ is an incredibly insidious phrase in this regard. That’s the facet of the topic, even if we’re just talking about framing positive and negative criticism.
Well, this might be a conflict of reads (“That guy’s a weak-tight fish.” “Really? I thought he was an laggy donk.”) but I’d be fairly confident in saying people are aware of the poison.
I mean, people who are sympathetic to trotskyism or council communism could be labelled ‘communists’ but that’s more semantic confusion.
I’m on record as describing Mao by saying “if a right-wing propagandist simply described Mao’s life he’d be criticized by his colleagues for being too heavy-handed, ridiculous and farcical.”
With this facet I think you’re preaching to the choir.
What I don’t understand, and find endlessly frustrating, is why so many otherwise educated and insightful people fall for the X system of government is the solution, where X is socialism or capitalism or some other thing, while acknowledging that other systems lead to horrible results largely due to issues of human fallibility. Like, it doesn’t take much study to see that any system of government or social structure can be abused and go horribly awry, and it’s because of people and their ability to accumulate power, social standing and wealth and a lack of checks on them, like, in every instance. So for me, I care a lot less about the political structure from an ideological sense, and much more about what checks the system has on the accumulation of power and influence.
Marxism and Socialism obviously need to take seriously the idea of how exactly they would bring about the change they need in the face of opposition, but so do most political ideologies. Boringly orthodox neo-liberal Emmanuel Macron is currently using rubber bullets to get shit done, and the militarised police here have blinded and maimed scores of French people under his yoke (and killed at least a couple). If France or the French regime was also involved in some sort of existential armed struggle then many more people would be dying in the name of ‘mild’ austerity. Many many more people did in Russia in 90s, or South America since the 70s, or…
Yeah scorching hot. Hot as the fucking sun.
@6ix how do you square that view with the fact that under a capitalist global system poverty has fallen by the largest amount in human history over the last 30 years?
I’m a fan of well regulated capitalism as it’s practiced in Scandinavia. I think the less well regulated version is a transitory phase that countries pass through on the way from subsistence farming to a modern society. I’m not saying it doesn’t have massive drawbacks, or that once it’s fully mature it doesn’t get pretty ugly in places, but it’s pretty silly to claim that it’s pure evil.
Macron decided to try to make the common people pay almost the entire bill for cutting carbon emissions. That was dumb. Every dollar in carbon taxes should have instantly been handed out in check form. If he’d done that instead of trying to keep it there wouldn’t need to be any rubber bullets.
This is a good and accurate post. The right answer in any given place is going to be some mixture of different things with an eye to what works there. My only political ideology is that I like stuff that works well and I like getting shit done. If I have a political philosophy I’m a utilitarian who isn’t OK with inflicting excruciating pain on a minority to benefit the majority in a minor way… but I’m also not OK with inflicting a ton of pain on a lot of people to prevent a small group of people (in this situation I’m talking about rich people lol) from experiencing economic harm. One person isn’t inherently worth more than another person regardless of their economic output.
So I’m going to be fine with heavily taxing rich people, but I’m not going to be fine with killing them. It’s all about how far you’re willing to go. I’m totally fine with killing the Sacklers (and honestly a great number of their employees) because they intentionally caused enormous suffering to benefit a tiny group of people. That kind of behavior is how I’d define evil.
No offence, and it doesn’t really matter to the point, but this is nonsense. The Gilets Jaunes were about a little more than that, but they haven’t been the big news in French social unrest for quite some time.
This works if you elect a secret Nazi, but when people vote for an open Nazi, you’re just a Nazi-ish country.