Women are hey you you’re finally awake you were trying to cross the border right walked right into that imperial ambush same as us and that thief over there

Personally I think the biggest reason is just how polarized people are right now. I mean, if Biden had been shot at, maybe there would have been a larger outpouring of sympathy - but I don’t think anyone would have changed their votes because of it. The number of people who are deciding who to vote for right before they do it is at the smallest its ever been, virtually nobody is interested in changing their vote out of sympathy for the candidate anymore.

I mean we’ll never know for sure but I think the fear that Trump had just won the election was a big part of why the push for Biden to step aside lasted as long as it did and got as loud as it did.

She could end all hunger in the UK and she chooses to do this. idk if you need to have a broken brain to become rich, or if becoming rich breaks your brain, but I can’t imagine having all those resources available to me and not trying to put them to good use.

There’s a part of me that still resides in Hogwarts too, but damn revisiting those books as an adult and seeing all of the things I just accepted as fine when I was a kid really sucked.

The only way to cut through propaganda is research. But 90% of people do zero research and simply assume that the things they see on movies and tv are a reflection of reality.

Some of us actually grew up in them.

So were you part of the majority that wanted to keep the Soviet Union? The majority that opposed German reunification? The majority that voted in a single socialist Korean government or the majority that supported the Vietnamese one? Because every time a socialist government is formed the same pattern plays out - the majority prosper, the majority support it, but the wealthy deposed ruling class cries about how they aren’t allowed to be in charge anymore until the US gives them the backing they need to overthrow the people and reinstate their own dictatorship.

While I cite that source for its wide ranging polls of Chinese citizen opinion, I think that a lot of the analysis is bunk because they start from the assumption that Xi is a dictator and base all of their conclusions off of that without first proving it. If you ask the Chinese people whether or not their system is democratic, the overwhelming majority say that it is.

When asked whether they believe their country is democratic, those in China topped the list, with some 83% saying the communist-led People’s Republic was a democracy. A resounding 91% said that democracy is important to them.

Now, this isn’t a great poll to base an entire political viewpoint on, because it’s actually pretty hard to define what a democracy is and what it needs to do to be considered a democracy. I think that the gold standard would be some kind of long term survey to see if government policy consistently reflects the opinions and desires of the electorate, like was done in this study of the US Government (I’m not aware of an equivalent to this study being performed in China).

Propaganda from the bourgeois: Taxing us is bad, actually.

Propaganda from socialist governments: We should all work together to build a better future!

These things are not the same.

we know what these countries are/were like

No you don’t! That’s my point! You believe a century of propaganda, and the only way that will change is if it is pushed back against at every opportunity!

You kinda cope in there by saying that the governments that called themselves socialist in the past were democratic, which is kind of not true for a lot of them. There’s degrees to it but for the most part they weren’t.

I would love some examples here. The Soviets conducted elections. The Chinese conduct elections. The Koreans conduct elections. The Cubans conduct elections. The Vietnamese conduct elections. My argument is not that any of their practices of democracy are without criticism, but that they are fundamentally more legitimate than any capitalist practice of democracy thanks to the elimination of bourgeois election influence ie PACs, donations, mass media campaigns, etc.

I think it’s smarter for us to distance ourselves from those governments as they ultimately didn’t really represent our views, not mine at least.

And I pointedly disagree with this. When you say “I am a socialist but every other socialist government was bad” you are severely undercutting your own argument right out of the gate. You should instead say, “I am a socialist because socialists have achieved great things” and fight back against the received propaganda about our movement that afflicts most of western society.

The study I’m referencing was an anonymous study conducted by Harvard between 2003 and 2016. It would strain credulity to suggest that the study’s participants all anonymously said that they love their government out of fear - firstly because they rated their government a lot lower in 2003 than they did in 2016, secondly because Harvard isn’t exactly in the pocket of the Communist Party of China.

I would also like to see the source

Here’s the Harvard study I’m referencing.

We find that first, since the start of the survey in 2003, Chinese citizen satisfaction with government has increased virtually across the board. From the impact of broad national policies to the conduct of local town officials, Chinese citizens rate the government as more capable and effective than ever before. Interestingly, more marginalized groups in poorer, inland regions are actually comparatively more likely to report increases in satisfaction.

This puts the 2016 central government satisfaction at 93.1%, Provincial at 81.7%, County at 73.9%, and Township at 70.2%. 75.1% of respondents also replied that they were “satisfied with eventual outcome” after an interaction with a local official.

Now granted this is all pre-COVID, pre-Xi Jinping’s third term, Pre-Hong Kong protests - but also pre-elimination of absolute poverty, pre-green energy revolution, and pre-massive rise in worker wages.

If you disagree with any of the things I said, then please do so. I would love to have my perspective broadened by more well thought out points of view. But all I get from most liberals and anticommunists is the same reheated arguments I’ve seen debunked over and over and over.

I mean, personally I think the Chinese nailed it. How else do you have government satisfaction rates - as measured by outside observers - that are 90% and above?

danke

Voting implies that someone will enforce the results of your vote. That means police and/or military, and that sounds awfully authoritarian to me.

The act of revolution is itself an authoritarian act. A bunch of people with guns force everyone else to listen to what they have to say. It was authoritarian when the American founding fathers did it, it was authoritarian when the French did it, it was authoritarian when the Russians did it.

What happens afterward is what counts. Every socialist society that has or currently exists has a democratic process, but capitalist countries point to the methods that various socialists have used to prevent capitalist takeover of their systems and say that those methods invalidate the whole process. Socialists, in turn, point to all of the rampant corruption that is taken for granted in capitalist elections and say that those make the process into a sham.

So the question is, do you believe that bourgeois control of mass media, political action groups, and the direct sponsorship of candidates by the wealthy invalidates capitalist elections? If so, to what extent do you think society should go to prevent those things from interfering in the democratic process? Whatever answer you come to, in order to implement it you will first need to get a bunch of people with guns together to dictate what the new democracy is going to look like.

Every socialist society that has or currently exists practices democratic elections. If you live in a capitalist country, however, you have been taught from childhood that those democratic practices are illegitimate.

For the record, it also mighta been something else that just happened to be cleared up by Tecnu.