What is your opinion about Communism?

[Aegon]

Yeah. My rights are EXACTLY the same in the capitalist Democratic republic I currently reside as it would be in a communist state. You got me.

First "system", then "state". Please put the goalposts back when you've finished with them.

Cheers

...
Uh. I still choose the US today over any communist state ever. Also countries around the world already have those things without having to starve their people or send them to camps.

Admittedly I've only spent 10 hours in the US so I don't know what it's like.

But I have been to another religion-dominated, open-carry country where tax money disappears into the coffers of the Military and politicians are bought and paid for. I enjoyed my time in Pakistan.

I have fond memories of both China and Vietnam. But that's mainly because of the girls.

What? Every country is a state. Communist is the system. What are you on about?

[Catholic_Lady]

This can be a start: https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/20-things...as-in.html

...but that's super light reading. If you really wanna know the ugliness of it, look into all the people Kim has killed.

C'mon CL... Look at some of the things in the article:

The leaders are a really big fucking deal there.

The same physical place can be fancy and shitty at the same time.

All kids wear the same uniform all the time, even when they’re not in school.

North Koreans seem to be lacking a sense of humor about the mausoleum that holds the bodies of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.

Kim Jong Il used a MacBook Pro.

Most of the time people walked together, I swear they were walking in step.

Not having internet must be pretty crappy but it'd be a stretch to call it inhumane or anything.

but that's super light reading. If you really wanna know the ugliness of it, look into all the people Kim has killed.

This will probably sound pretty harsh and I don't support it either but the truth of the matter is it is very normal for higher ups in political power to kill their opposition or kill for political gain..Everybody does it, yes America does it as well, Cuba, Russia, does it as well, in fact it would be probably impossible to find a country without at least a couple thousand political deaths..but consider this, it is estimated that Fidel Castro that once ruled over Cuba has killed around 3000 people in his lifetime, the figure is probably overblown for shock effect but it's still probably around there somewhere. 3000 people in his lifetime...now, that's probably the amount of people that are killed by us drone strikes and deaths in conflict areas...in a single year..... If we're going to use "no of people killed" as a sort of scale to measure how evil people are then...

You forgot all the stuff about how they have no personal freedoms, hardly any electricity nationwide, and are lied to by the Government about all kinds of things.

But like I said, that's very light reading and doesn't show the real ugliness and oppression.

[Anomalocaris]

C'mon CL... Look at some of the things in the article:








Not having internet must be pretty crappy but it'd be a stretch to call it inhumane or anything.


This will probably sound pretty harsh and I don't support it either but the truth of the matter is it is very normal for higher ups in political power to kill their opposition or kill for political gain..Everybody does it, yes America does it as well, Cuba, Russia, does it as well, in fact it would be probably impossible to find a country without at least a couple thousand political deaths..but consider this, it is estimated that Fidel Castro that once ruled over Cuba has killed around 3000 people in his lifetime, the figure is probably overblown for shock effect but it's still probably around there somewhere. 3000 people in his lifetime...now, that's probably the amount of people that are killed by us drone strikes and deaths in conflict areas...in a single year..... If we're going to use "no of people killed" as a sort of scale to measure how evil people are then...

You forgot all the stuff about how they have no personal freedoms, hardly any electricity nationwide, and are lied to by the Government about all kinds of things.

But like I said, that's very light reading and doesn't show the real ugliness and oppression.

Just to be factual, North Korea no longer claims to be communist or claim to follow the teaching of Marx or Lenin.  The communistic or Marxist phraseology has even been written out of the North Korean constitution.
North Korea is now explicitly an ethnostate that doctrinally pursue autarchy both by declaration and in practice.  This is Fundamentally in conflict with the most basic tenants of classic Marxist or Leninist communism, which are internationalist.

Also, to be accurate, Leninist communism is not just some utopian ideology of voluntary community ownership.   It is in principle an imperial ideology that explicitly seeks to aggrandize itself without recognition of traditional national or ethnic borders through any coercive means necessary, and does not recognize the legitimacy of national boundaries and believes itself universally applicable and must be universally applied for the good of humanity. In fact it generally believes its own survival depends on its own continued expansion. Marxism and Leninism may be considered unusually, perhaps uniquely internationalist amongst major political ideologies. Stripped of the Internationalism, one might say communism as we’ve come to understand the term wouldn’t be real communism. So the ethnocentric and autarchic outlook of North Korea is not communistic.

At its heart, Leninist communism is also both overreachingly extravagant in its ambition, and paranoid in its out Look.  It simultaneously claims 1) total confidence in the perfection of its own outlook and its own limitless growth, thus justifying why people should follow it, as well as 2) profess to be continuously in mortal danger from “class enemies” seeking to overthrow it from within and capitalist imperialist enemy states seeking to throttle it from abroad, thus requiring continued commitment to a siege mentality and acceptance of brutal measures to ensure comformity. However, these aspects are by no means unique to communists. Fascism and Nazism depended on these same things. To a lesser degree trumpism also appeal to these things. So while North Korea retained these attributes bequeathed to it by its communist past, these do not make it communist.

[DLJ]

Yep, like any other political system.

No. Advocating dictatorship like Marx did is something, Capitalistic systems are something else.
Communism is beating the rich kid and taking all their cash out of jealousy, hate and insane dreams of utopia. That's why the soviet union fell and the U.S survived.

Muslims saw what soviets mean in wars. Afghanistan, Chechnya, the leftovers of Syria now, Egypt's army...etc.
Communism is hell. It means a rifle and a boot to your teeth, just for having money.

Not all political systems are punishing those who are born wealthy like communism does. Not all systems enforce atheism on its citizens (slaves). Not all systems shoot you for praying in public.

At least we can pray and talk under capitalism.

Capital isn't the system, it's just a means of oiling the wheels.

"beating the rich kid and taking all their cash out of jealousy, hate and insane dreams of utopia." ... could also be said of the French Revolution. Guillotines instead of rifles and jack boots.

"Muslims saw what soviets mean in wars. Afghanistan, Chechnya, the leftovers of Syria now..." are you claiming that Russia adopts a communist system? Nope. Think more like: White, Christian Oligarchy ... same as the US.

[Minimalist]

To cover all that, epic songs are used to drug the slaves:

The Internationale was a rousing tune.

[ErGingerbreadMandude]

Who said this? 🤔

"beating the rich kid and taking all their cash out of jealousy, hate and insane dreams of utopia."

It's more like, instead of letting resources get concentrated with a few people it is distributed evenly among everyone, if you want to better your life you can't ignore your starving neighbor...that kind of thing. 🤗

[Anomalocaris]

To cover all that, epic songs are used to drug the slaves:

The Internationale was a rousing tune.

Like the Koran and the Muslim call to prayer aren’t even more idiotic drugs for even dummer slaves.

[The Grand Nudger]

Really?

Yeah, really.

There is no such thing as the natural state of human beings. Natural states of human being are all states in which any human manage to find himself.  One might say a more typical natural state would be a state which occurs with greater frequency in a particular condition.  Typically states which occur with greater frequency are those in which larger societies tend to find itself because that state arise from a more competeive social structure that have out competed other alternative possible structures.  The state of collective ownership is uncommon amongst Iron Age cultures or later, which implies it is uncompetitive and therefore less typically natural in the post Iron Age environment.

OFC there's such a thing.  The state in which we found ourselves for 200-50 k years can be described no other way.  I'm aware that it began to dwindle come the iron age, and that's..conveniently, when capitalism began to rise as a "pragmatic and organic" system.  In conflict.  No surprise there.

In so far as it is “entrenched” in our “spiritual ideology”, the spirit stems from the awareness that most people have a below average share of the total society’s resource, and ideology says “I’d be richer now if everything is shared evenly”.

That's a particular hindsight speaking.

[Anomalocaris]

1st, we actually Have no clear idea of what full range of detailed social or economic structure our ancestors had between 200k - 50k years ago.  We have mainly deduction emboldened by scarcity of evidence.

2nd, the argument that if we lived one way for 150k years and another for only 5k then the state assumed to have prevail for 150k must be more natural based on length of practice is similar to the argument that a newly freed slave who lived most of his life as a slave should go back to being a slave since that by length of practice must be his more natural state. We lived how we lived for 99% of our existence as a species purely because of a lack of means to do otherwise.

3rd. If you argue that genetically or behaviorally we might be better or more thoroughly adapted to a social structure or way of life that prevailed for 150k years than that which prevailed for 5 k years, and hence we should Return to the social structure we are better adapted to, then I must point out are not the same people as 200k - 50k years ago.  We are not even the same people as 12k or 5K or even just 1k years ago.  The changes to how we live our lives left clear imprints in the occurance and frequency of different behavioral and even metabolic genes in our popukation.   How our ancestors lived 50k years ago is as unnatural to us now as how we live now would be unnatural to them.

Take for example the gene that render its bearer susceptible to gestational and type 2 diabetes.  That gene carried great survival benefit to hunter gatherer societies and any early agricultural societies exposed to high probability of famine because it promotes the storage of energy and nutritional reserves as body fat.  But this gene has been almost completely selected out of southern and western Europeans only since the 17th century because Europeans, through adopting a proto-capitalist society that was a able colonize the Caribbean and develop a transoceanic trade network that promoted the growing of sugar canes and the widespread adoption of refined sugar in the diet, suddenly found the life saving gene in a famine now created a deadly vulnerability to gestational diabetes and full blown type 2 diabetes.   The fact that Europeans who were vulnerable to gestational and type 2 diabetes died off in droves between 1550-1800, leaving a substantially altered gene pool better adopted to the realities of a new society incorporating the effects of protocaoitalism is well documented.

The comparatively very low incidence of type 2 diabetes amongst people of Western European descent as compared to population that was not exposed to refined sugar until more recently is glaring even when Europeans consume much more refined sugar than those other groups.   How dramatically even higher is incidence of diabetes and susceptibility to duabetes amongst populations that had been exposed to severe famine in the last 100 years more glaring still.

So the natural state from just 500 years ago - frequent famine and genetic adaptation to better survive these famines - are no longer the natural state to which we are genetically adopted today.

[The Grand Nudger]

1st, we actually Have no clear idea of what full range of detailed social or economic structure our ancestors had between 200k - 50k years ago.  We have mainly deduction emboldened by scarcity of evidence.

Meh, we have a fuller picture than the above would suggest..but it's immaterial.

2nd, We are not the same people as 200k - 50k years ago.  We are not even the same people as 12k or 5K or even just 1k years ago.  The changes to how we live our lives left clear imprints in the occurance and frequency of different behavioral and even metabolic genes in our popukation.   How our ancestors lived 50k years ago is as unnatural to us now as how we live now would be unnatural to them.

We're not iron age or victorian peoples anymore either.  Yet, the economic structure that we fixate upon now has it's true litmus test there.

Take for example the gene that render its bearer susceptible to gestational and type 2 diabetes.  That gene carried great survival benefit to hunter gatherer societies and any early agricultural societies exposed to high probability of famine because it promotes the storage of energy and nutritional reserves as body fat.  But this gene has been almost completely selected out of southern and western Europeans only since the 17th century because Europeans, through adopting a proto-capitalist society that was a able colonize the Caribbean and develop a transoceanic trade network that promoted the growing of sugar canes and the widespread adoption of refined sugar in the diet, suddenly found the life saving gene in a famine now created a deadly vulnerability to gestational diabetes and full blown type 2 diabetes.   The fact that Europeans who were vulnerable to gestational and type 2 diabetes died off in droves between 1550-1800, leaving a substantially altered gene pool better adopted to the realities of a new society incorporating the effects of protocaoitalism is well documented.

Is the above supposed to be taken to mean that capitalism bred some negative gene out?  Come now........

The comparatively very low incidence of type 2 diabetes amongst people of Western European descent as compared to population that was not exposed to refined sugar until more recently is glaring even when Europeans consume much more refined sugar than those other groups.   How dramatically even higher is incidence of diabetes and susceptibility to duabetes amongst populations that had been exposed to severe famine in the last 100 years more glaring still.

Uh huh.

So the natural state from just 500 years ago - frequent famine and genetic adaptation to better survive these famines - are no longer the natural state to which we are genetically adopted today.

O-kay..............................................................?