111–120 of 124 posts
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US has a higher government spending as a % of GDP than China.
Yeah our military is a good example of what a centrally planned communist US might look like.
This has me wondering, do people think the military is 1/3 of the US economy? That would explain a lot of discourse.
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Pretty much every remotely developed country is capitalist. The wealthiest country with a non-capitalist economy is Cuba or Turkmenistan, depending on where you draw the line.
The context of this discussion is Brazil and the intentions of the socialist Brazilian government. Are you claiming that the socialist party in Brazil intends to dismantle capitalism? In case you are unaware, countries can have capitalist economic systems and still have significant socialist traits like: large public sectors, state enterprises for natural monopolies and important industries, subsidized education and…
I don’t intend to defend the “socialism bad” argument. There are several countries (many in Europe) that have great outcomes while being about as socialist as left-wing Latin American governments. I think a fairer criticism is some of the Latin American parties have a track record of flawed implementation that caused distrust among a lot of the population.
If the American system is so good, why does it always need to be promoted in such strange ways? LA people should be so eager to be pro-America
China is doing propaganda. Russia is doing propaganda. Iran is doing propaganda. That's life, play the game or lose. This is like sales and marketing, idealists think you can build the perfect product and it will sell itself. It won't. It's an adversarial marketplace and you have to show the world what you did, against people who are trying to tear you down.
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But this is to privilege 100+ year old origins of these terms over their actual application and development in most of Western Europe. It’s anachronistic and misleading.
No, this was true in USSR so like even 40 years ago, I grew up exposed to that a lot and believe me no one can say for sure which is which. To keep things fun, USSR was not communist either for most of the time, it was sort of socialist I guess. There are a lot of jokes reflecting the confusion between socialism and communism and how we always go to communism but never reach it Today there are examples of socialist b…
In the UK at least, the distinction was important because calling oneself a socialist was acceptable, whereas being a communist during the Cold War was not.
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But this is to privilege 100+ year old origins of these terms over their actual application and development in most of Western Europe. It’s anachronistic and misleading.
No, this was true in USSR so like even 40 years ago, I grew up exposed to that a lot and believe me no one can say for sure which is which. To keep things fun, USSR was not communist either for most of the time, it was sort of socialist I guess. There are a lot of jokes reflecting the confusion between socialism and communism and how we always go to communism but never reach it Today there are examples of socialist b…
There were plenty of communists who didn't like that last part - but they were brutally purged by the autocratic-dictatorial faction. Famously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky
I'd blame the angry, simplistic Western denunciations of anything vaguely resembling communism (including socialism) on the Western monied classes. Whether Old Money, Plutocrats, Wall Streeters, wanna-be's, sycophants, or whatever - those folks generally hate any idea which might mean less for them, and more for the 99%.
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What are you talking about? There are entire groups of renowned "journalists" that turn out to be CIA collaborators. The renowned New York Times admitted they receive approval from the US government. Bellingcat, renowed "independent investigative journalists", turns out to be CIA-funded, and is awfully quiet with their investigations in situations where it does not suit NATO allies' agenda. There's a reason why the p…
The only systematic state propaganda in question is the propaganda you are retailing here. Bellingcat-o-mania in particular is a pure, paid, propaganda initiative of Putin's Assadist phase. Billions were spent to produce armies of brains that type what you just typed.
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Smells like "no true scotsman" fallacy because they are nearly synonyms. Nobody in USSR could tell the exact difference or at least there was no consensus, and you are expecting modern Americans to do better huh? This basically sums it up: > According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "Exactly how communism differs from socialism has long been a matter of debate, but the distinction rests largely on the communists' adh…
That's entirely orthogonal to the fact that Americans thend to label literally anything and everything they don't like as communist. Especially any sort of social(ist) policy good for the people and bad for the 1%.
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A better example of capitalism doing actual famine would be the Irish Potato Famine, which was concurrent with the writing of the actual Communist Manifesto. Communism has also had famine, famously both the Holodomor in the USSR and the Great Leap Forward in China. The only thing that really seems to end famine, is a deliberate policy of subsidising the overproduction of food.
How is it better? It's kind of weird to attribute those famines, or e.g. the Kazakh famine contemporary with the holodomor which was arguably worse but is less well known, to communism. Quick industrialisation would be a much better, though partial, explanation. If it was a property of communist or socialist projects, why'd you need to reach almost a century back to find examples? We're massively overproducing food n…
The Potato Famine is a good example because the UK government at that time considered Ireland to be "domestic" and was fully in charge of both the location and all responses, not only economic support but also with the capacity to change the laws, to raise taxes to perform emergency redirection of food from elsewhere, etc., and did not because laissez-faire capitalism (which specifically opposed food aid for famines occurring within the British Empire) was highly influential in the UK government at the time.
Your example wasn't such a strong one, because the current risk of famine in West Asia that the US can be blamed for, is not only extremely indirect (via starting a war which reduces fertiliser supply which screws over crop production but only if the conflict remains active for long enough) but also one of the few things about this conflict that is clear is that Trump did it despite plenty of advisors saying "don't do this, it is bad for the interests of the USA", for reasons including but not limited to the US dependence on oil which in turn is because president Trump also seems to think alternatives to oil are a conspiracy and keeps doing executive orders to make them go away.
The UK screwed up back then in a way that supported the rich. The US is screwing up right now in a way that doesn't. I don't think the victims care(d) in either case, but the former case can be blamed on capitalism more strongly than the latter case.
> We're massively overproducing food now, and still have famines.
Not within the capitalist nations. Or indeed the heavily industrialised nations, because your alternative hypothesis is perfectly sound as industrialisation is necessary (though not sufficient) for overproduction of food.
> Egalitarian distributive policies are key to ending hunger.
Only if they were global, though even then overproduction would still be necessary; sadly this is the exact opposite of what the USA voted for. Would you blame that more on capitalism or on democracy?
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Pretty much every remotely developed country is capitalist. The wealthiest country with a non-capitalist economy is Cuba or Turkmenistan, depending on where you draw the line.
The context of this discussion is Brazil and the intentions of the socialist Brazilian government. Are you claiming that the socialist party in Brazil intends to dismantle capitalism? In case you are unaware, countries can have capitalist economic systems and still have significant socialist traits like: large public sectors, state enterprises for natural monopolies and important industries, subsidized education and…
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It's strange that people look at the millions dead from starvation from communism, and the quite recent destruction of Venezuela, and still think communism can somehow work this time .
Is this supposed to be an example of propaganda? The line that socialism killed millions uses the unfair standard of attributing wide categories of end-of-life to socialism but not to capitalism or Tsarism.
Especially when the year before the agricultural reforms there was minimal starvation.