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Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Links - 13th March 2024 (2 - Socialism)

Meme - "Reddit's r/Socialism Survey: 48% Unemployed, 61% Live With Parents, 14% Support Free Speech You've been banned from participating in r/socialism."
/r/socialism survey results are in: 48% are unemployed, 61% live with parents, 69% are uneducated, 14% support free speech, 46% support riots (x-post /r/Drama) : EnoughCommieSpam

Persistence Despite Revolutions - "Can efforts to eradicate inequality in wealth and education eliminate intergenerational persistence of socioeconomic status? The Chinese Communist Revolution and Cultural Revolution aimed to do exactly that. Using newly digitized archival records and contemporary census and household survey data, we show that the revolutions were effective in homogenizing the population economically in the short run. However, the pattern of inequality that characterized the pre-revolution generation re-emerges today. Almost half a century after the revolutions, individuals whose grandparents belonged to the pre-revolution elite earn 16 percent more income and have completed more than 11 percent additional years of schooling than those from non-elite households. We find evidence that human capital (such as knowledge, skills, and values) has been transmitted within the families, and the social capital embodied in kinship networks has survived the revolutions. These channels allow the pre-revolution elite to rebound after the revolutions, and their socioeconomic status persists despite one of the most aggressive attempts to eliminate differences in the population."
Liu Qiangdong, the ‘Jeff Bezos of China’, on making billions with JD.com | Financial Times - "Virtually every Chinese millionaire or billionaire is self-made because capitalist reforms to the centrally planned communist economy only began in the early 1980s and did not really take off until the 1990s. But the modern super-wealthy often turn out to be descended from an earlier capitalist class"
Clearly this shows the power of inherited privilege and why we need to destroy society to remake it. Communism will surely work if it's tried again, and goes further this time
The implications of this for claiming wealth inequality is inherited and thus unjust are interesting

Social Mobility and Political Regimes: Intergenerational Mobility in Hungary, 1949–2017 - "This paper measures social mobility rates in Hungary during the period 1949 to 2017, using surnames to measure social status. In those years, there were two very different social regimes. The first was the Hungarian People’s Republic (1949–1989), which was a communist regime with an avowed aim of favouring the working class. The second is the modern liberal democracy (1989–2017), which is a free-market economy. We find five surprising things. First, social mobility rates were low for both upper- and lower-class families during 1949–2017, with an underlying intergenerational status correlation of 0.6–0.8. Second, social mobility rates under communism were the same as in the subsequent capitalist regime. Third, the Romani minority throughout both periods showed even lower social mobility rates. Fourth, the descendants of the eighteenth-century noble class in Hungary were still significantly privileged in 1949 and later. And fifth, although social mobility rates did not change measurably during the transition, the composition of the political elite changed rapidly and sharply."

Enemies of the people - "Enemies of the people were the millions of artists, engineers, professors, and affluent peasants that were thought a threat to the Soviet regime for being the educated elite, and were forcedly resettled to the Gulag, i.e. the system of forced labor camps across the Soviet Union. In this paper we look at the long-run consequences of this dark re-location episode. We show that areas around camps with a larger share of enemies among camp prisoners are more prosperous today, as captured by firms' wages and profits, as well as night lights per capita. We also show that the descendants of enemies are more likely to be tertiary educated today. Our results point in the direction of a long-run persistence of education and a resulting positive effect on local economic outcomes. A 28 percentage point increase in the share of enemies increases night lights per capita by 58%, profits per employee by 65%, and average wages by 22%."
Destroying prosperity to increase inequality is a winning strategy in the long run  

Why "Hearing Both Sides" Is Dangerous - YouTube
Why "Hearing Both Sides" Is Good, Actually - YouTube
The commies are at it again

How Venezuela Struck It Poor – Foreign Policy - "What explains the country’s precipitous decline from being one of Latin America’s richest and most stable states? Mark Green, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, blames President Nicolás Maduro — who, in May, won another six-year term in elections widely denounced as fraudulent — and his “delusional” policies. But while there’s no question Maduro is partially culpable, to fully understand how a country blessed with the world’s biggest oil endowment could end up so crushingly poor requires going much further back. The fuse for the bomb that is now blowing up Venezuela’s oil industry — and the country along with it — was deliberately lit and fanned by Maduro’s predecessor and mentor, the strongman Hugo Chávez, not long after he swept into power in the late 1990s. The decline and fall of Venezuela’s oil industry essentially begins with its nationalization in 1976, a time of booming crude prices and rising resource nationalism...   Unfortunately for Venezuela, Chávez — like many of the people he appointed to run PDVSA — knew nothing about the business that was so central to the country’s prosperity. “He was ignorant about everything to do with oil, everything to do with geology, engineering, the economics of oil,” said Pedro Burelli, a former PDVSA board member who left the company when Chávez took power. “His was a completely encyclopedic ignorance.” But Chávez wasn’t the type to let that stop him... During the strike, he axed scores of senior executives, including Juan Fernández, one of the organizers of the protest. In the months that followed, the pink slips kept coming, and by the time the smoke finally cleared, Chávez had fired more than 18,000 workers. With them went most of the managerial expertise and technical know-how PDVSA had managed to preserve during the earlier purges.   This evisceration of the PDVSA’s human capital would prove the most damaging of Chávez’s many moves against the company. Even his own government soon realized the harm it had done. Accidents and spills began to proliferate, and in 2005, a top energy ministry official admitted privately that it would take at least 15 years to rebuild the technical skills lost by the mass firings. Another energy ministry official even asked U.S. diplomats in Caracas to help arrange training in the United States. And in the years since, the situation has only worsened. Conditions at the company (and in the economy) are now so bad that employees take home a pittance — just a handful of dollars a month — and face political pressure to support the regime. Such treatment has led to the large-scale flight of skilled workers: more than 25,000 since last year, union officials say. According to Reuters, the exodus has grown so big that some PDVSA offices have begun refusing to let their workers resign... While some of his underlings clearly understood the havoc he was causing, Chávez either didn’t know or didn’t care; determined to finance his ongoing socialist revolution and use cheap exports to buy friends abroad, he kept turning the screws on the oil industry. Using legally questionable methods, he started siphoning off billions of dollars in PDVSA revenue to pay for his social programs, including housing, education, clinics, and school lunches. While this strategy may have paid off politically in the short term, it was extremely dangerous: for the more cash the government took out of PDVSA, the less money the oil company had to invest in maintaining production or finding new resources...   Increasingly desperate, the government soon found yet another way to strip-mine PDVSA: by using whatever management expertise it had preserved to run other parts of the economy that were breaking down. By 2007, for example, PDVSA had been dragooned into producing and distributing milk; later, the firm began importing other basic foods, from cooking oil to rice and beans. The company’s work in these areas may have provided the country with some short-term relief, but it further distracted PDVSA from what should have been its core business... despite the collapse of its oil industry, Venezuela continues to buy foreign oil to ship, at a loss, to the regime’s ideological cousins in Cuba — a bitter legacy of Chávez’s plan to use Venezuela’s oil riches to buy friends in the neighborhood."
Damn US sanctions, forcing Venezuela to wreck its economy and unleash death squads!

Wikipedia may delete entry on ‘mass killings’ under Communism due to claims of bias - "A Wikipedia entry detailing “mass killings under Communist regimes” faces being purged from the platform over fears about bias... The future of a page titled “Anti-communist mass killings” is not in doubt, however, as the entry outlining occasions on which Communists have been killed under other poltical systems has not been flagged over concerns about neutrality... The proposed deletion of the page of crimes under Communism has been criticised, with Cambridge historian Prof Robert Tombs arguing that downplaying the connection between genocide and ideology would also prevent the teaching of crimes under Facsism and colonialism  He said: “This is morally indefensible, at least as bad as Holocaust denial, because 'linking ideology and killing' is the very core of why these things are important.  “I have read the Wikipedia page, and it seems to me careful and balanced. Therefore attempts to remove it can only be ideologically motivated – to whitewash Communism.  “Already, this appalling history is downplayed: in Britain, schoolchildren are much more likely to study the Third Reich than the Soviet Union."
Of course, if you talk about the commies trying to wreak havoc today, you are the crazy one

Meme  - Capitalism: *Commies queuing up for Apple*
Communism: *Commies queuing up for bread*

Meme - Andrew Riggs: "I will never understand internet communists/socialists talking about how they would set up the best systems for society when most of them can't even diffuse normal disagreements with their friends."

Meme - Communists, Socialists: *working class guys hitting on and leering*
Bashful Busty Blonde: *The wealth built by Capitallism*

Meme - "Socialists are the Anti-Vaxxers of economics"

Meme - "Person 1: I would pay $3 for that burger.
Person 2: I really like burgers, I'd pay $5 for it.
Person 1: That's interesting, the value we place on a good appears to be subjective, based on our tastes and personal preferences; independent from the amount of labor hours put in this particular good.
Karl Marx: *triggered*"

Meme - Damion @commiedamion: "If your family "suffered under communism" that says a lot more about your family than it does about communism. Good people don't suffer under communism - slavers and exploiters do."

Meme - LAZY, ENTITLED, ANTI-WORK COMMIES: "Tell me the truth...I'm...I'm ready to hear it"
Anyone with a brain: "The hammer and sickle represent labor/work"

Meme - Gan @GanAgenda: "Stalin wasn't a pedophile. He had a consensual relationship with Lidia Pereprygina when she was 14 and he was in his 30's (the AOC in Russia was 14 at the time.) He went on to have two children with her. Some say it started when she was 13-an arbitrary distinction by some months"

Meme - "Monkeys can learn to use money. Scientists taught Capuchins to exchange silver discs for treats. A few weeks into the experiment, the monkeys began budgeting for foods they liked. They started buying food when the price dropped and even started gambling. Eventually, rich monkeys figured out they could pay each other for sex."
Libertarian & Authoritarian Left: "YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE ANARCHO-PRIMITIVIST!"
Libertarian Right Monkey: "Uh."

Meme - "DO YOU REALLY THINK TELLING TIMMY THAT SANTA IS REAL IS A GOOD IDEA?"
"BELIEVING THAT A MAGICAL RED-SUITED MAN HANDS OUT STUFF FOR FREE? HE'LL GROW OUT OF IT."
*Adult Timmy with Communist shirt*

Rebranding Socialism - "“You’re chairman of the Democratic party. Tell me the difference between you and a socialist,” Matthews pressed. Wasserman Schultz couldn’t—or wouldn’t—do it.  It was a telling exchange. At least since the New Deal, national Democrats have been forced to defend themselves against the charge that their belief in aggressive government intervention in the economy was a smokescreen for their true desire: a “soft” socialism, resembling that which has taken hold across much of Western Europe. Over the years, Democrats have developed a standard reply: if you think this is socialism, then you don’t know what socialism is. President Harry Truman once said that without the New Deal, the tide of true international socialism would have washed over America’s shores during the Great Depression. “Almost surely we would have socialism in this country, real socialism.” President Obama made a similar point in 2013: “People call me a socialist sometimes . . . But, no, you gotta meet real socialists. You’ll have a sense of what a socialist is.”  Though Wasserman Shultz may not have gotten the memo, executing that reliable rhetorical maneuver is no longer necessary. Democrats in 2015 are all-in for socialism. An October YouGov poll revealed that Democrats view socialism more favorably than they do capitalism, by 49 percent to 37 percent. Calling yourself a socialist is no disqualifier for public office in today’s Democratic Party. It might become a requirement.   Tearing a page from Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals—“If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive”—Democratic leaders like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are road-testing a redefinition of socialism that they hope the American public finds palatable. It goes like this: government is just the things that we do together; doing things together is socialism; government is socialism. We have a government already; therefore, we have socialism already. Get over it.   In a March Daily Kos article, “75 Reasons Not to Fear Socialism,” Jerry Nelson declared that “socialism is alive and well in America and it’s been here for decades.” As proof, he offered examples ranging from the unobjectionable—bridges, public schools, and the GI Bill—to the absurd—government, the law, and civilization. “I think there are a lot of people who, when they hear the word ‘socialist,’ get very, very nervous,” Sanders said recently. But they shouldn’t, he suggested, because socialism is just another word for all the wonderful things in life. “You go to your public library, or you call your fire department or police department, what do you think you are calling? These are socialist institutions.”  If police and fire departments are socialist, then America has been leaning socialist since Boston established the first publicly funded police department in the United States in 1838—ten years before Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels published their Communist Manifesto. According to this logic, Democrats from FDR to Obama who popped veins in their necks declaring that they weren’t socialists were either lying or confused about the term’s meaning. We’re all socialists, you see, and we always have been... Whether Democrats succeed in rebranding socialism will depend on whether enough Americans believe that saying something often enough can make it so."
From 2015

XaureliusX on X - "There is zero chance that the cock sculpture went unnoticed -- and yet it was approved. Same with the RGB demon-arms creature."
Theo Jordan on X - "The Civil Rights Penis was built by a Queer+ ideologue. The Ruth Bader Medusa was built by an Anti-Racist ideologue. Both spoke of their art as revolutionary "resistance". These acts are the very definition of "intentional"."
James Lindsay, against magic on X - ""Current Communist Goals," from Cleon Skousen's The Naked Communist, 1963, as available in the children's literature section of the Marxists Internet Archive: "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.""

Whyvert on X - "Cuba: "production of pork, rice and beans - all staples on the Cuban dinner plate - are down by more than 80% since 2018." No free oil subsidy from Venezuela, so Cuba can't afford to import fuel and fertilizers. -> food shortages like classic communism."

Xi Van Fleet on X - "Happy Martin Luther King Day!  In his paper “Communism’s Challenge to Christianity”, King speaks of Communism as the only serious rival to Christianity.  Why does Communism seem irresistible to so many people? One of the reasons is while Christianity promises paradise in heaven, Communism promises it here and now.   As long as there are people believing  that they have god-like power to bring heaven to earth, Communism will have  followers. And they are confident that they can do it right this time."

A Century After Lenin’s Death, His Evil Legacy Lives On - WSJ - "His legacy is a world whose moral equilibrium he helped to destroy.  The Soviet Union was based on Marxism, a secular religion, and Lenin was the architect of its system of antimorality. For Lenin, as he said in his speech to the Komsomol on Oct. 2, 1920, morality was entirely subordinated to the class struggle. An action was right not in light of “extrahuman concepts” but only if it destroyed the old society and helped to build a new communist society.  The effect of this theory is felt today in post-Soviet Russia, where the legacy of communism’s blanket rejection of universal morality destroyed the hope for democratic reform. Lenin’s theory also inspired modern terrorism and contributes to the weakness that leads many in the West to condone ideological crimes. .. In February 1917, Lenin’s party, the Bolsheviks, had 24,000 members. It was able to triumph in a country of more than 100 million because it was a machine of concentrated power that accepted murder and glorified it as a moral obligation. Isaac Steinberg, the non-Bolshevik justice minister in the first revolutionary government, objected to summary executions. He sarcastically asked Lenin: “Why bother with a Commissariat of Justice? Let’s call it the ‘Commissariat for Social Extermination.’” Lenin’s face lit up, and he said: “That’s exactly what it should be, but we can’t say that.”  The combination of dedication to Marxism and total contempt for ethical norms made it possible for the communists and their successors to establish totalitarian regimes in the 20th century that ruled more than one-third of the world’s population. Although most of these regimes no longer exist, the damage they did is likely to be felt for many years to come. Russia today is noncommunist but no less lawless than under the Soviets. Arbitrary rule, once codified in Marxist-Leninist ideology, is now justified by the prerogatives of the state, which take absolute priority over the lives of individuals.  Russian officials interpret the purpose of Russian history as the strengthening of the state. In a 2008 speech, Vladimir Putin said that maintaining Russia’s place as a “mighty nation” calls for “enormous sacrifices and privations on the part of our people.” In other words, his ambition is the same as Lenin’s: for Russians to suffer indefinitely for the state. Russia has suffered an estimated 360,000 casualties in Ukraine. That hasn’t persuaded Russian leaders to stop the war. In a recent speech, Mr. Putin said the solution was for Russian women to give birth to more potential soldiers. “Many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had seven, eight or even more children,” he said. “Let us preserve and revive these excellent traditions.”  When the Soviet Union fell, Russia dismantled the socialist economy but didn’t restore the moral framework Lenin destroyed. The result was the rise of a criminal state no less dangerous than its predecessor—one that has engaged in assassinations, shot down civilian airliners, and even bombed apartment buildings to bring Mr. Putin to power. Lenin’s influence is also evident in the terror perpetrated in the name of political Islam, like Marxism a system of total explanation. The savagery of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack against Israel reproduced almost exactly the Bolsheviks’ tactics against suspected nonsympathizers and other civilians during the Red Terror (1918-22).  One of Lenin’s last writings was a set of recommendations for deceiving “deaf-mutes,” his term for Western capitalists who were ready to ignore Soviet crimes in their pursuit of profit. His plan was to promote the fiction of a legitimate government in the Soviet Union separate from the Communist Party and establish relations with as many countries as possible to create a false impression of normality.  Lenin’s plans were adopted by the Soviet regime and inherited by post-Soviet Russia with its fixed elections, controlled Parliament and “outreach” through such institutions as the Valdai Discussion Club, which after its founding in 2004 played an important role in misleading Western officials and experts about Russia’s intentions."
Among other things, this ignores the legacy of the Russian Tsars

Meme - endclasssociety: "CHINA tells Yemen to 'stop harassing civilian ships in Red sea'. Move comes after Xi's FM meeting with Egypt's El-Sisi"
"CHINA AFTER CAPITALIST RESTORATION IS NOT THE REVOLUTIONARY CENTER IT ONCE WAS. COMBAT NORMALIZATION AND COMBAT REVISIONISM."
They're actually right. When you want to destroy the world economy, you support the Houthis disrupting shipping lanes

Meme - "All these billionaires only want to go to space because guillotines need gravity to work"
Why are left wingers so violent?

Meme - 🇵🇸𓂆 kiran کرن فاطمہ We'll Remember Your Silence @kiranfatimaopal: "If you are still making excuses it's because you want somebody else to carry you. Instead, you could grow the fuck up and do what you can do to help others. Stop acting like you are the center of the universe and you don't owe anybody anything. If you're a leftist, act like it.
A fascist worked out today. Did you?"
Sultan of Stink @BeanMisanthrope: "I have a disability and chronic anxiety comrade and frankly physical fitness is right-coded fascism."

Meme - techno wizard occultist @liamtoomster: "When Lenin said "he who does not work, does not eat" he meant those who live off investment dividend and rents. Not the unemployed worker"
All these commies would be the first ones to be sent to the gulags they are demanding to be built

Meme - ""GUESS WHAT? YOU'RE A SOCIALIST!"
a newly-discovered Dr. Seuss song:
Do you like your Water Clean?
Do you like your Forest Green?
Do you like the Parks you've Seen?
GUESS WHAT? YOU'RE A SOCIALIST!!
Want your Medicine Safe to Take?
Food that's Safe to Cook and Bake?
Your Car to Stop when you Hit your Brakes?
GUESS WHAT? YOU'RE A SOCIALIST!!
Want your kids in School Today?
Or well-made Roads to Drive Away?
Or Fire Trucks and Cops to save the Day?
GUESS WHAT? WE'RE ALL SOCIALISTS!!!"
The left always mock the right for calling everything socialism, but they have no idea what socialism is either

Meme - "Me listening to religious ppi describe heaven as a moneyless, stateless, classless world, then criticize cOmmunism"
When you admit communism needs magic to work

Meme - Stephen Hicks: "Good question. My hypothesis: It's a modern variant on the Philosopher-King complex: Philosophers they're smarter than everyone else so they should be in charge, and they believe most people are and so need to be directed. Socialism is a perfect ideology for that complex. Philosophers will be Dictators leading the Proletariat (Marxist version) or they will embody the General Will (Rousseauian version)."
David Bernstein: "What's wrong with the philosophy majors?"
"The Majors Most and Least Likely to Favor Socialism
Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of socialism?
Philosophy - 39% very favorable. 39% somewhat favorable
Anthropology - 19% very favorable. 45% somewhat favorable
English - 21% very favorable. 37% somewhat favorable
International Relations - 7% very favorable. 51% somewhat favorable
Sociology - 17% very favorable. 40% somewhat favorable
Music - 19% very favorable. 38% somewhat favorable
Law/Criminology - 6% very favorable. 22% somewhat favorable
Economics - 8% very favorable. 18% somewhat favorable
Finance - X% very favorable. 18% somewhat favorable
Accounting - X% very favorable. 15% somewhat favorable"

Meme - *Fast Food worker with red 'socialism' T-shirt with Che Guevera and red Make America Great Again MAGA Baseball Cap*

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