“A Gallup poll in June 2015 found that almost 70% of U.S. millennials would be willing to vote for a socialist presidential candidate. Even more shocking, a poll conducted before this year’s presidential election by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that barely half of millennials believe ‘Communism was or is a problem.’
The same poll found that a quarter of millennials hold favorable opinions of Vladimir Lenin, while 18% think favorably of Mao Zedong. More than 10% even have positive feelings about Joseph Stalin.”
Side effect of the Republicans calling everything to the Left of Thatcher “Socialism” tbh. It was bound to have consequences eventually.
The general... concept of "how did we get here" is echoing loudly through my mind and I don't know what to do about it. "We" being the human race and "here" being our state of sin. I mean, I know intellectually, but it's just, at any point, we could have... not? Sinned? And we didn't. Not sin.
I’m not sure how to answer this, except “blessed be thou, oh Lord, who has sent his son…”
Osama bin Laden uses the word “Palestine” 13 times in his letter explaining his actions while having just a few throw-away paragraphs on women, sex, gambling, etc.
Admittedly if Palestine wasn’t an issue it’s tough to say that Islamic supremacists would say okay that’s fine pack up and go home no need to agitate for our religion any more.
True, but if not for the prominence of US imperialism they’d have a far more difficult time finding significant bases of support.
we could stop feting Malala and leave Pakistan to its own devices, I guess?
Who needs Palestine? Give the territory to Jordan and Egypt, demobilize the whole identity, and it’s no longer under Israeli rule.
Also, if you want the US OUT of the Middle East, staging a terrorist attack that literally kills thousands of people, thus providing the political will to invade middle eastern countries that did not previously exist for a President that was just barely elected is the opposite of what you should do.
And you know what? I’d much fucking rather have “GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE MID EAST AMERICA! REEEEEEE!” as the running Mid-East origin terrorist campaign, since while it would be ten times as expensive in terms of destroyed Western infrastructure, it might stop dumbass American politicians from interfering in the Mid East again, and again, and going “no this time will be different and it totally won’t just simultaneously kill people and waste absurd amounts of money”.
Dear Leftists: Stop virtue signaling to make you look good on social media, no amount of virtue signaling is going to bring back the dead or stop the terrorist attacks. You Leftists are morally bankrupt so your virtue signaling is pretentious.
If you want to practice Islam in the inconsequential, semi-secular sense. Fine. But the only way to solve this problem is to recognize that POLITICAL Islam and anyone who follows its prescription is inherently incompatible with western values.
That means:
Want sharia courts? You’re not welcome.
Think it’s okay to marry a 6 year old? You’re not welcome.
Think it’s okay to strike your wife for ANY reason? You’re not welcome.
Believe in ANY kind of punishment for apostasy? You’re not welcome.
Believe in ANY kind of punishment for “blasphemy”? You’re not welcome.
Period. These are the kinds of values that progressives would defend
against any radical Christians who believe any of the above. And
rightfully so. So why can’t we all agree on these universally? Anyone
who holds any of those beliefs is by definition, incompatible with the
western world.
People are giving President Trump crap for calling them “losers”.
Listen, the guy isn’t eloquent, but he’s right. These terrorists fear
shame more than death. It’s why Abu Graib was such an outrage when
American, female soldiers stripped them naked and laughed at them while
dogs barked. To them, that is a far greater punishment than death or
even torture. If any American received said treatment at the hands of
ISIS, we’d thank the lord above that we weren’t being burnt alive in
cages.
We don’t merely punish terrorists through death. We punish them through
shame. At least ONE leader is willing to give it the old college try. So
today, I stand with the President of the United States, instead of
trying to mince words on social media and virtue-signal about how much
“unity” we need.
the evil that is political Islam. To unite with it’s practitioners would be to unite with evil. Anyone who sees that as a virtue is simply enabling evil and by proxy, is evil themselves.
can you legitimately imagine waking up and seeing the bombing of innocent people just to see a concert and spouting some pure vitriol like this? like how must it feel to know that you are trying to push your islamaphobic views in the wake of a tragedy like this? like maybe i’m too much of a “morally bankrupt” leftist to get it but ok
“HOW DARE YOU implicate the Communist Party in this famine which was an entirely predictable consequence of Communist policy about which we were warned repeatedly!? Don’t you care about the victims at all?!”
Look man,
I know someone with a URL like libtards-are-cancer is not gonna be the most charitable guy towards liberalism, but these terrorist attacks are ideological in nature, and they were completely preventable. Japan does not have Islamic terrorist attacks, and it is not because they work so hard to love and tolerate Muslims. Unfortunately that ship has sailed, but something different needs to be done, and it starts with acknowledging that there is no law of the universe that religions have to be equally dangerous.
i’ve got bad adhd that i don’t do much to address (thanks to my bad adhd) so I would actually like to thank the discourse for making me aware of fidget toys
I’m trying caffeine + L-Theanine but my situation is more mild, and I’m not sure if it’s working yet due to poor sleep.
You: “Dude, you are the lamest person imaginable.”
Me: “Impossible! The lamest person imaginable is someone who is lame in all respects and to the highest degree. Now, in the respect of existence, clearly it is lamer not to exist than to exist. Thus, it is impossible that the lamest person imaginable should exist. Therefore, I am not the lamest person imaginable. QED”
>wake up with a lot of pent-up aggression and anger with no real viable outlet
Yeah this can’t be healthy lmao
The funniest thing is that my lack of an outlet is part of the reason I’m so angry. I’m mad because there aren’t really socially accepted spaces for me to vent my emotions, so if I want to talk about how I feel I need to go to the Dark Corners Of The Internet
i do actually think a communist revolution in Japan or Australia would increase life expectancy-
oh fuck me
I… I just… Japan has one of the highest life expectancies on Earth. Communist revolution generally tends not to be so great. How does someone even reach this level of misunderstanding?
With Taiwan recognising gay marriages it’s time to update predictions for China, Japan, and Korea.
I still think Korea will be last, but it’s tough to decide whether Japan or China will go first.
Either way if Australia still can’t pull its head out of its butt in the next 24 months someone is going to have to crash another 4wd into parliament house.
fuck, no divorce yet? someone ought to get on that.
I think you’re way too optiministic about China. At best you’ll get some very local recognition in big cities like shanghai, for legal and tax purposes.
pragmatic!
How would Singapore fare? Would it come in behind China, Korea and Japan?
wow good question, and what about Hong Kong??
Regarding Singapore, the rumor I’ve heard is that Lee softened on gays in his old age, but they didn’t get rid of the laws so much as not really enforce them. While I admire some of their policies, this is not one of them.
Theresa May killed more than 50 kids. Thatcher killed more than 50 kids. Clinton killed more than 50 kids. Trump killed more than 50 kids. Just realize the facts for once.
Theresa May killed more than 50 kids. Thatcher killed more than 50 kids. Clinton killed more than 50 kids. Trump killed more than 50 kids. Just realize the facts for once.
I’m working on a higher quality blog post for the main site on this, but for right now I’d like to point out a novel idea. Consider this quote from the article
A single-payer system likely “would be more efficient in delivering health care,” said Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. (California Healthline is produced by Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.)
But the proposal expands coverage to all and eliminates premiums, copayments and deductibles for enrollees, and that would cost more money, Levitt said. “You can bet that opponents will highlight the 15 percent tax, even though there are also big premium savings for employers and individuals,” he added.
We always hear this. “Single payer health care will save so much money because of all the efficiencies that you can get from central management”
Is this true? Well it just so happens we have a real-world example: HMOs. For example, Kaiser Permanente, the entity referenced in the above quote.
(an aside for non-US readers: in the US, health care is generally privately provisioned, and fee-for-service. That is, if you want a doctor to do a thing, you give them money, and they do the thing. Most people have some kind of health insurance, and this tends to take one of two forms: HMO or PPO.
PPOs are standard, and flexible. In a PPO, the insurance company develops a “network of providers”, a set of doctors who have agreed to work with the insurance company. You are strongly encouraged to go see one of these doctors. If you choose to see a different doctor, “out of network”, your insurance will cover a smaller fraction of the cost. This remains fee-for-service, it’s just that insurance pays.
HMOs, on the other hand, take a very centralized approach. They are one large company responsible for catering to your health needs. In an HMO, you can only go to doctors at facilities run by the HMO. If you need a specialist, you must get a referral to a specialist who works for the HMO. Since everything is integrated, it’s easier for multiple doctors to coordinate and work together. However, your choice of doctor is severely limited. With a PPO, if you don’t like your doctor you can get a new one. Under HMOs, your choices are limited)
The description of HMOs sound a lot like single-payer health care writ small. You give lots of money upfront to an organization like Kaiser (you pay lots of money in taxes to the government to support health care), and in return you go to Kaiser-affiliated facilities (government-funded hospitals) where all of your care is provided to you by one entity. The centralization facilitates efficiencies as bureaucracies are cut, and your needs are taken care of as best they can.
So, approaching the problem from a different point of view: Single-payer government-provided health care is more-or-less the same as if everybody signed up for Kaiser.
This gave me a deliciously trollish idea, an argument to bring out whenever relevant. Let’s say you’re arguing with some commies who insist that single-payer is the best/only solution. Pose to them this hypothetical:
“Would you be in support of a law that gave $HEALTH_INSURANCE_COMPANY a legally-mandated monopoly in health care, at the cost of forcing them to become a non-profit organization?”
Imagine one way to implement single-payer government-provided universal health care:
1) Give Kaiser a legal monopoly on health insurance
2) Legally require Kaiser to be a non-profit.¹
I suspect that most of your commie friends would be incredibly opposed to this idea, and yet it is fundamentally the same thing as a state-run single-payer health, with two caveats
a) You aren’t legally required to opt-in. You can still pay expenses out-of-pocket instead.
b) Instead of the health system being run by whoever is friendliest with our elected representatives, it’s run by people with a proven track record of success in that field.
I suspect this argument generalizes, too. You could apply it to any realm of government service provision that you can think of. It might help a handful of the smarter, more intellectually ethical folks see things from a different perspective.
1. Kaiser IS ALREADY A NON-PROFIT. So much for “greedy health insurance corporations ruining everything in their greedy corrupt quest for more profit”
The way single payer works is that it negotiates prices with providers which it can do because it’s the only buyer. It’s the same way Singapore does it, it’s just there they set legally prices but don’t pay them. Maybe you should look at how this shit works instead of just imagining how it works.
I still laughed. TBH I don’t understand why the Repubs don’t spring for healthcare vouchers. Well, okay, I understand why but …
Has anyone examined this specific form of conservative nostalgia that specifically focuses on crime?
Usually goes like “back in my day you didn’t need to lock your door when you left” and stuff like that. Which usually ranges from false (crime went down overall) to cartoonish (people are saying these things about 90s Russia, when the country was literally ruled by organized crime)
Many say it’s straight up racism, but it’s pervasive in relatively monoethnic countries too.
It may also be a rural/urban thing. Crime is higher in urban areas for reasons (unless you’re Singapore or something), but over time people move and also (at least in this country), most areas become more urban.
There may also be more awareness of crime (due to media), or alternatively, crime may be a lot higher in certain areas, while overall it has declined in the national average.
“ATLAS SHRUGGED,” A NOVEL THAT PREACHES THE FERENGI CONCEPT OF OBJECTIVISM AND THE EVILS OF ALTRUISM AND HANDOUTS, WAS MADE INTO A TWO-PART FILM. PART ONE WAS SUCH A FINANCIAL FAILURE THAT THE PRODUCTION TEAM TURNED TO KICKSTARTER TO ASK FANS TO DONATE THE FUNDING FOR PART TWO. THEY REFUSED TO SEE THE IRONY IN THIS.
As we all know, under the principles of Affirmative Action, Asians, particularly East Asians, are not only white, but whiter than white people, and may in fact be the whitest race in existence.
Thus it is entirely appropriate that the Korean Overwatch character D.Va should receive a skin inspired by an American con artist.
the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence against its own citizens is a ‘common good’ with respect to the capitalist class, in the same way that roads and schools are common goods with respect to the rest of society… as neoliberalism slowly strips away the functions and capacities of the state in order to sell them for scrap, what remains untouched by the ravages of privatisation is nothing else but the coercive monopoly. when better than the present to serve as a police officer?
I suspect that the past was a better time to serve as a police officer, and it’s unlikely to get better in the future.
It has already begun with Libertarian/Capitalist plans to “make the perpetrators of crime responsible for paying its costs” as city budgets have declined, resulting in police forces bringing back debtors’ prisons and getting a significant part of their revenue from fines, which is partly responsible for terrible racialized police relations in many US communities (even though many US police forces are multiracial).
Because, y'know, having a justice system that actually works isn’t a public good, right? People are ‘totes atomic yo.
The Left could maybe have put a stop to this… but the problem is that since they have embraced Globalism, you can’t have a sturdy social safety net and mass immigration, because it incentivizes people to migrate to go on your welfare system. It also gives you a disadvantage in the global marketplace over countries that are willing to be crueler for money. The natural tendency of Globalism is towards atomized global capitalism in which the wages of all across the world will be equalized and social protections will not exist.
You could do some things to fix this - in one nation, where the benefit of the people of the nation was considered valuable rather than oppressive.
Feminist Man: yeah well you wouldn’t be saying that if you just got some pussy, you fucking faggot-
I can’t tell if this is a pro-feminist post or an anti-feminist post.
it is exactly what it appears to be: pointing out that people repeat messages that claim to be feminist, but which reinforce the traditional patriarchal world-view, and indeed only make sense at all in terms of that world-view.
whether you interpret that as a a criticism of feminist ideology, or a criticism of people who claim to be feminist but aren’t really, or a criticism of the way that every ideology that gains any status at all is quickly subverted and repackaged as a harmless commodity, is entirely up to you.
I just think it’s annoying for people to go around saying the opposite of what they claim to mean, because I am a huge dork.
yesterday I was thinking about how our only solutions for low-level pain relief are basically paracetamol and ibuprofen, which haven’t changed for over 50 years; so much for tech progress.
then I heard a breathless advertisement for a revolution in pain relief! …it was a tablet that combines paracetamol and ibuprofen.
at this point it seems likely that the biggest advance in pain management in the 21st century will be legalizing weed.
Nah, there’s some combination of chemicals in the research pipeline that eliminates physical pain entirely. Of course, then you get the same problems as those guys who are congenitally unable to feel pain, but that’s probably a step up for many of the chronic pain cases.
I'm a liberal. Here, anonymously, free of the Dictatorless Dystopia and threat of social punishment, I can exclusively confirm you guys come off as huge jerks.
Is this about MRAs?
Anon-kun, honey, I am not an MRA. I am an MRA sympathizer and Feminism sympathizer.
And as for the MRAs, of course they will come off as jerks - their ability to get any resources has been made dependent on showing that men have it as bad/worse than women, because they are constantly shut down for “WELL WOMEN HAVE IT WORSE” which implicitly ends with a very sexist “therefore your problems don’t matter and no resources should be devoted to addressing them.” (And resources have been denied IRL from attempts to address those problems.)
Look, you can either have a movement which actually attempts to resolve all gender issues for real and does not dismiss them because they are coming from “oppressors,” accurately realizing just how bound up together the knot of gender is, or you can have a movement which focuses exclusively on the issues of women. You can’t have both. You tried to have both, and that’s what got you MRAs.
I would also like to suggest cutting back on some of the demonization. For instance, there was an “MRAs Hate Mad Max: Fury Road!” article circulating about. I went looking in places where I previously saw MRAs gather, and they were all baffled by it, because none of them hated Fury Road.
The group that would have disliked it are the r/theredpill types (warning: r/theredpill has lots of actual misogyny, I cannot stand to read it), who are not the same group, but which there is a propaganda advantage to conflating with MRAs, who threaten feminism’s monopoly on the non-trad gender discourse.
A majority of MRAs could still be demobilized if Feminism were BETTER. That won’t happen, because Feminism not being better is how MRAs came to exist in the first place, and the forces that caused that haven’t been corrected, so in fact we’re just going to see more MRAs created.
Yes, that’s right, Anon-dear. More MRAs.
As for GamerGate - have you ever heard of something called the GNAA? Professional troll groups were trollin’ like there was no tomorrow, and GGers were also receiving death threats, questionable mail, etc. The whole thing didn’t really explode until all the “LOL GAMERS ARE DEAD” articles came out.
Might I suggest not engaging in an attempted cultural takeover that involves kicking the original demographic out of their own subculture, which is exactly what those articles were. Everyone knows that if the target weren’t predominantly white, low-status males that wouldn’t have flown.
The transition of GGers to further right-wing has been interpreted as evidence that they were vile oppressors all along, but actually the causality is the other way around. An opening was created for them to become disillusioned and more right-wing by the situation, the callouts, what many felt was a misrepresentation of themselves in the MSM, and so on.
There are two other groups this anon could be about.
Nationalists - Who, like the bean counters that keep corporations afloat, will always be perceived as villains by some because they are the ones on whom responsibility for buzzkilling various liberal projects falls.
Rationalists - I don’t really qualify as one, though I probably qualify as -adjacent.
"why nearly half the nation thought Donald Trump’s vision of America was a compelling one" What's so surprising about a positive vision of creating jobs by eliminating competition from Mexican immigrants and Chinese workers appealing to non-coastal-elite white-working-class men?
Honestly, I mostly agree with you that this is the explanation. There’s kind of a pattern where liberal thinkpiece writers will either try to explain the Trump phenomenon in terms of one or a few components of these things, or else think of it as a result of a bunch of independent factors that add up to produce it. In reality, Trump voters seem to believe in the entire narrative, and it seems like a mistake to address it as though it’s merely the sum of its parts. “Illegal immigrants come to America, take our jobs, dilute our culture, bring crime and drugs, spur social atomization, and collude with the left to keep us down, all while shipping what few jobs are left overseas and imposing stupid and/or malicious regulations on us to benefit the bureaucrats over the little guy” is an entire worldview that, despite how silly it might seem to us liberals (except for maybe the part about cronyism), a large fraction of the country Actually Believes. Economics lesson about the Iowa Car Crop don’t seem to be helping much, and I’m not sure how much we can get Trump voters to trust us when we tell them that the narrative is faulty when there’s a genuine value difference in how much we care about preserving Red Tribe culture and helping the ingroup versus trying to help everyone by being globalist/universalist.
