Took a nasty spill wakeboarding last week. I’ve broken a lot of bones in my time and ribs are probably the most annoying. Nothing you can really do about it (wrapping is now not recommended as it can cause pneumonia). When I sneeze I think I pee a little.
It’s so very simple. America’s economic system top-down is corporatism. It is NOT capitalism, and it is NOT socialism, and short of a revolutionary war against corporatism and winning that war (despite it owning all the assets), neither of these interests can impose their desired economic system, and so all discussion is irrelevant.
They can not win by voting, because DC is captive of the corps…
We already know what voting left will lead to—“bla bla socialism, free healthcare for all, social security, now UBI!” which just ends up corporate scams, debt, Ponzis, corps maximizing profits by sucking the gov printing press dry. You can NOT layer socialism on top of corporatism. Done.
We already know what voting right will lead to—“bla bla captialism, tax cuts, less regulation” which just ends up corporate tax cuts, debt, trickle down, Ponzis. You can NOT layer capitalism on top of corporatism. Done.
Seriously, at what point do Americans face reality?
Gotta embrace the corporate AI overlords. That is realistically the only way we are ever going to get ex machina style sex bots and that is really what matters.
Can’t wait for the robots. I’m tired of using my cheating hand. Anyways all I can do is insert my disc inside my laptop right now. It’s a lot better than before when I used my floppy stuff!
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
Democratic socialism is effectively what you see in practice in Scandinavia. Works pretty well there.
The big positives are things like healthcare and education where the out of pocket expenses are very reasonable which means that the average person has a high quality of life. In the US, you need to be very wealthy or lucky to receive high quality healthcare or education. Is that a failure of capitalism? I’m not sure. But the Republican party is ideologically opposed to a state-run healthcare system even though it has been proven to work much better and more cheaply than the current US model which is hugely expensive and has poor outcomes.
Are Scandinavian countries really “democratic socialism” as pertained to the definition of “social ownership of the means of production” or are they just an example of big government?
Well if the Nordic countries are not democratic socialist, where is? People there generally would regard themselves as that I would think.
The old theoretical distinction between communism and capitalism doesn’t exist in the real world any more if it ever did. Europe mixes some aspects of socialism with aspects of naked capitalism, as does China which is no longer in any meaningful way a communist country. Even North Korea is not really communist so much as a totalitarian dictatorship with a struggling economy.
People in the US were brainwashed for a couple of generations with propaganda that the Russians were the devil and that the reds under the bed were going to get you. So socialism became a dirty word. One of the bye products of this is that the United States spends vastly more on health care per capita than any other nation with below average outcomes (below the OECD average that is). Better solutions are available but are ignored for ideological rather than pragmatic reasons.
This is a bulsh*t in reality. Trust me. And I lived in liberal socialist country. For those under the Soviet block the situation was even worse. I visited Cuba a long time after we escaped from Socialism and it was like I was back in 50s in Eastern Europe.
Meanwhile, the Socialism disappeared but is still in the mind of people. Entire generations including mine totally screwed up.
For clarification… I am not joining the “socialist tribe”. Im just trying to hash out what people who do subscribe to it are actually thinking they want to accomplish. That way, when I judge them for being anti capitalistic ignorant fascist who don’t even understand their own ideology, it can come from a place of understanding and facts
