Hey kids: Don't be a sucker for socialism

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Dire Measures to Combat Hunger in Venezuela

Venezuela has been teetering on the brink of political meltdown and economic collapse for months. Food shortages have now grown so severe that religious leaders are urging people to label their tossed out food for those scavenging to fill their empty stomachs.

A prominent priest and vocal opponent to President Nicolas Maduro’s regime urged followers to label their trash so the hungry can forage “with dignity.”

“Try to preserve food waste so that people who eat out of garbage cans can praise the Lord,” Father Jose Palmar wrote in a social media post, as Panam Post reported.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/03/dir ... bel-trash/

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Very sad about Venezuela.

Yep....and the fat cats of the government there continue to rake in the Bolivars....

This has happened to virtually every nation which adopted frank socialism as their political ideology.

If you love socialism, then you hate poor people.

The way to lift people out of poverty, by the hundreds of millions, is to do the exact opposite of socialism. Here's a new video on the things that actually release people from poverty:

What's up with that?

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation- ... 53119.html



Well, guess that answers why.

"Let them eat brownies!"

http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/201 ... f-hoarding

I dunno, man, which news isn't fake?

http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/B ... -0053.html

But given how often it seems that corruption is the official national sport of the human race maybe a bit of it on each side is what the truth is.

Funny, I thought people got lifted out of poverty by empowering workers to organize in order to grab business below the belt and twist till the get what they want.
Incidentally, siding with business to stop workers from doing this is genuine hatred of the poor.

Agreed. Direct action, unionism, and boycotts are historically proven methods to improve working conditions and general conditions for the poor.

Just as a side note related to that whole workers vs. business thing, I'd like to mention the concept of Worker's Cooperatives as quite an interesting one. They essentially focus on the fact most corporations are essentially the economic equivalent of what would be politically called a dictatorship or oligarchy, led by a CEO or a board of directors whose main goal is simply to make profit. A cooperative would replace this with a democratic system where workers could vote and decide the action's of their business. Numerous successful worker's cooperatives have been set up throughout the world as well, with the largest of these probably being the Mondragon Cooperatives in Spain.

Anyways, at the very least its an interesting concept, and at the very most has some potential to reduce economic inequality and spread the democratization of the workplace.

(Whoo boy, I'm gonna get a lot of crap saying I'm a total dumb socialist aren't I? I'll prepare for the worst just in case.)

I wish Worker's Cooperatives were the way of the future. I suspect corporations would fight them every step of the way if said Worker's Cooperatives became too numerous and powerful.

Unfortunately, they pose quite a dangerous threat to the current status quo, so that would almost definitely be the case. So the only possible way to render the counter-actions by corporations futile would probably be to convince the majority of the population in a country that more coop's would in their best interest. However, in the modern world it can be hard to convince a majority of people to do just about anything, so I suppose my hopes for that aren't exactly high.

why people in right wing videos talk like the viewer was idiot or a child? every video I see about liberalism has this same tone.

I couldn't open the original article for the thread... but I think this quote is very unfair:

"It is a common misconception that socialism is about helping poor people. Actually, what socialism does is create poor people, and keep them poor. And that’s not by accident."


It doesn't make sense? socialism is some kind of umbrella term to a lot of different stuff, but mainly, if the aim of socialism is equality/end economic classes it doesn't make sense that we judge it by this terms. there won't be rich people and there won't be poor people, everyone should have their basic needs covered and society's value should shift in other direction than money. it's unfair to judge a system based on values from a different system.

on real socialism it happened to impoverish people but it wasn't their hidden agenda but was simply caused by external factors because the system couldn't be ideal.

it's the same thing as there is a lot of people in slave-like labor under capitalism or people who is rich basically by inheriting stuff otherwise than meritocracy: there is flaws that interact with the system. it would be unfair to define capitalism as a system based on slave labor or heritage.

i have never seen more ignorance. socialism is .... you know what never mind you capitalists are too far gone

I think much of the anger against socialism in this thread is quite justified, however, that is only because there is quite a large misconception going on here. You see, pretty much all nations in the modern world that have claimed to be socialist are actually what is called authoritarian socialist, which means they totally reject democracy, so authoritarian socialist is basically a fancy word for dictatorship. What, in my mind, is pure socialism would actually be called libertarian socialism. Which advocates collective, democratic control over the economy by the people who take part in it. This could be defined as control by the society, while capitalism would be the control of the economy by private power and auth. socialism (dictatorship) would be control by the state.

So basically, actual socialism does benefit both democracy and economic equality. However, we don't yet know if it would ever work because no nation has ever really adopted libertarian socialism in the past.

by the way i want to establish a few things. The USSR was not real communism. China was and is not real communism. the DPRK is not real communism, pol pot was not real communism, and venezuela is not real socialism. as the man above me pointed out, there is libertarian socialism, go look it up. there is also social democracies, which are a hybrid of socialism and capitalism, with democratic government.

People say about dangerous things, like drugs, guns, hammers, sticks, stones, and naughty words, that they are morally-neutral, depending on who uses them. The state is an abstract idea, which might be used as a force multiplier, for good or evil. It can do no harm, if it is not leveraged by a harmful person.

In fact, there is a middle ground between anarchism and authoritarianism, called abstentionism, in which someone can occupy high office, and choose not to apply force. That is their right, as an executive, just as having the hammer does not mean that everything looks like a nail. Who goes around, hitting everything, in real life.

Yep, no government has ever achieved "true communism" like the kind that Marx talked about either. All the communist countries you mentioned, and all others that have sprouted out in the modern world, are simply dictatorships hiding behind the veil of Marx's ideas, corrupted to a terrible extent. Actual communism would be a system where there would be no state government, no social classes, and workers would control everything. As you can see, this would be at the least a very hard system to create, at the most it would be simply impossible.

As for social democracies, I feel those actually have a lot of promise in the future, in fact, the not so distant future. Already, countries in Europe such as Germany and those in Scandinavia have already adopted many democratic socialist as well as market socialist economical policies, such as those aimed to preserve economic equality and stability. And those nations have so far turned out great as far as I know. So overall this seems to be a promising time for these more moderate forms of socialism to flourish.