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bot_483's avatar

Only capitalism does those bad things, right? How many indigenous people did Stalin wipe out, Mao? How has the central authoritarian Asian governments improved "Nature" via a new coal plant every week, or pouring plastics and other trash into the rivers and ocean?

Look, we now know that the left is an authoritarian, fascist wantabe state lurking in the wings, we see it in the EU, we se it in the US swamp. Quit enabling fascism with your lame excuses.

There is no point in having anything, if people are not free to enjoy it.

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Carol Diane Bevis's avatar

There are no leftists in the US government. There are right-wing neolibs/neocons in service to the oligarchy which is capitalist and increasingly fascist and the opposite of leftist or of communist.

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bot_483's avatar

Oh...the semantic BS, what a terrible place to hide. Look they are central authoritarians pilfering the government. That is not opposite leftist or communists in practice. The fact that multi-national mega corporations replace giant central authoritarian government is meaningless in practice, unless you're one of those, most aren't.

Human nature being what it is, pandering to individual liberty and not collective (forced) nonsense is much more preferable. Of course there are many people who believe that they know what is best for others, those are typically leftists and they are nearly always wrong and they are always doing it for the wrong reasons.

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notBob's avatar

How many indigenous tribes wiped each other out long before the white man showed his face ? Mayans were ruthless genocidal empire builders

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bot_483's avatar

7,946

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Susan Mercurio's avatar

Did you actually read Caitlin's article before you came here to comment? I believe that she addressed the "Stalin/Mao" rebuttal. Go read, really read, the article again.

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bot_483's avatar

Her Ipsi Dixit plea that competitive-based society is pushing us towards all things evil is neither supported by fact or historical record.

moreover, her supposition that capitalism is not collaborative and that communism is is, again, neither supported by the fact or historical record. Jesus h Christ, we are (were?) a democracy, that is by definition collaborative. Tell me about the collaborative nature of communism, as practiced anywhere in history - it is the opposite, it is feudal.

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Susan Mercurio's avatar

Go read The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen.

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bot_483's avatar

Childish 19th century babble. Completely irrelevant today - much like Deniro's lame "Amsterdam" trying to explain the non-left as would be tyrants. Completely boorish.

In the essay “The Dullest Book of The Month: Dr. Thorstein Veblen Gets the Crown of Deadly Nightshade” (1919), after addressing the content of The Theory of the Leisure Class, the book reviewer Robert Benchley addressed the subject of who are readers to whom Veblen speaks, that:

“the Doctor has made one big mistake, however. He has presupposed, in writing this book, the existence of a [social] class with much more leisure than any class in the world ever possessed — for, has he not counted on a certain number of readers?”

or:

In the essay “Prof. Veblen” (1919) the intellectual H. L. Mencken addressed the matters of Americans' social psychology reported in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), by asking:

Do I enjoy a decent bath because I know that John Smith cannot afford one — or because I delight in being clean? Do I admire Beethoven's Fifth Symphony because it is incomprehensible to Congressmen and Methodists — or because I genuinely love music? Do I prefer terrapin à la Maryland to fried liver, because plowhands must put up with the liver — or because the terrapin is intrinsically a more charming dose?

LOL. You do not have any real evidence of a successful communist regime and only offer the sophmoric 19th century babblings of a self-loathing person who felt isolated from society...this seems to be the typical M.O. of the socialist/communist lefty academics. "Some historians have also speculated that this failure to obtain employment was partially due to prejudice against Norwegians (he is Norwegian)."

To want a utopia where everyone works to a common end is a nice fantasy, but one that is only realized through horrific costs to individuals. Some think that mean justifies the ends, others are not sociopaths.

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Susan Mercurio's avatar

Yes, plenty of his contemporaries wrote criticisms of Veblen. It wasn't his iconoclastic economics, however, that upset those Victorian and Edwardian professors, it was his private life. Women threw themselves at him and he wasn't the man to resist. He had several affairs and marriages. Oh the shame!

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