this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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Socialism

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Y'know what radicalized me? Watching cops skate the prosecution damned near every time they lynched a Black man, woman, or child. That's how I learned Jim Crow is still alive and well. That's how I learned this is no democracy, it's a fascist oligarchy that sacrifices its subjects-of-empire to the false gods of the Market.

This is why half the time, my posts end off with 'death to Amerika'-- because there is no way to reform a slavemaster.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago (1 children)

This is why half the time, my posts end off with 'death to Amerika'

What I hear is half the time you offer more grace and patience than this guilty nation deserves

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago

You're really not wrong; but I come from a people that prioritize grace and patience-- or at least, our elders claim to. Some of what I was taught erodes slower than other subjects ig

[–] [email protected] 38 points 4 months ago (2 children)

You know what “radicalized” me? Existing in a poorly regulated capitalist system.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Even regulated Capitalism is brutal, unsustainable, and dangerous.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It's almost like no matter how old or how advanced we get we need somebody to break up our fights and to make us share our toys so that our little siblings can play with them.

That's kind of weird but treating any sufficiently large group of humans like a child eventually becomes a necessity to prevent them from turning into an unregulated group of psychopaths.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It's almost like no matter how old or how advanced we get we need somebody to break up our fights and to make us share our toys so that our little siblings can play with them.

Sure, even in Socialism and Communism there would be laws and a government.

That's kind of weird but treating any sufficiently large group of humans like a child eventually becomes a necessity to prevent them from turning into an unregulated group of psychopaths.

I don't think this has any bearing in reality, it just sounded nice in your head.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Kay : A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

No, I don't. People work better socially than individually.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It's a quote from Men in Black.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I disagree with the ideas you're presenting through Men in Black quotes.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

Your disagreement has been noted

[–] Squirrel 3 points 4 months ago

That about sums it up, yeah. My beliefs aren't radical, but my thoughts on the means that should be taken to realize them are becoming more radical.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 4 months ago (1 children)

To be fair, wanting to entirely restructure society is radical in the sense that it's a fringe view, not that it's illogical. It is logical, just uncommon.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago

That said, it's pretty clear that people in the political mainstream see the system as a being perfectly sensible. They genuinely do believe that ideas such as redistribution of property are radical in the sense of being extreme.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I think people shouldn't be allowed to suffer when preventing that suffering is easy, and that makes me a radical utopian idealist apparently

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I messed up putting my answer here and I cant delete stuff cause jerboa/android 8. Please see below

[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

What we want isn't radical, it's common sense human rights. It's just that the denial of those common sense human rights in the permitted stages of political theater leads to us pursuing radical solutions.

If you didn't want to end up a pretty bit of paintwork on the wall you should've allowed us a democratic workplace alongside a democratic government and chose to join us on the working line instead of insisting on keeping our wealth through illegitimate power.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 4 months ago (1 children)

or as Parenti put it in Blackshirts and Reds

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Mikey always lays it out the best

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Sometimes, I am not sure if I am a leftist, or if I am a person with empathy, and an unwillingness to see people suffer... who happens to live in a capitalist system.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago

I imagine that's how most people end up on the left. Once you start seeing the brutality of the system, it quickly becomes repulsive.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago

I, for one, happen to think that basic human decency is pretty radical 😎

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (3 children)

All of y'all need to get into the original meaning of that word. Radical basically just means "take a problem by it's roots".

The interesting part is what type of society/politics makes that some kind of slur.

Materialism is thinking of things and their development on the grounds of history and causality, like a play of material and its organisational emergent forms (like ideas and their neurons). Whereas Idealism means imagining some kind of methaphysical structure or idea behind thins, like a god or ghost (Geist, Hegel, Kant...).

Utopia refers to an imagined, but possible world. When well done/thought, it is what you think and feel about how things could be. By definition this seems impossible regarding the currwnt state of affairs, and utopia will never come put as you imagined it. History is too complex for that. It is still necessary to be able to think utopia somewhat, otherwise one cannot hope and everything is eiter determined or irrelevant.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I agree with your takeaway, although the "extreme" definition is right next to it and is perfectly valid too. It's indeed interesting how loaded the word is by default.

3
a: very different from the usual or traditional : extreme
b: favoring extreme changes in existing views, habits, conditions, or institutions
c: associated with political views, practices, and policies of extreme change
d: advocating extreme measures to retain or restore a political state of affairs
the radical right

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago

What do you mean global healthcare? You should have to earn your living!

~ someone who was born into a rich family

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Radicalism is relative. The right could probably say something about Jesus in the same vein.