Ideology and the death of satire - "As the 2017 hit The Death of Stalin illustrated, communism is an inherently funny system because it is both built on wild optimism, and because the terror and malice is often so random and nonsensical. The Nazis coldly and precisely murdered their enemies but otherwise left obedient citizens alone; communism consumed its most sycophantic supporters in an absurd manner. Nazism was inherently evil in its intentions, while communism created evil out of human naivety; that made it both less morally repugnant, but also funnier. ‘Unlike other commonly acknowledged ideologies, such as imperialism, Capitalism, fascism and fundamentalism, Communism was inherently “funny” because of a unique combination of factors’, Lewis wrote: ‘The ineffectiveness of its theories, the mendacity of its propaganda and the ubiquity of censorship were all important. The cruelty of its methods interacted with the sense of humour of the people on whom it was imposed. The concentration of all political and economic power in the hands of the state, and the state’s attempt to direct artistic activities – that meant that any joke critical of life in a Communist society was de facto about Communism. All these things created the innate and inalienable humour of Communism, its greatest cultural achievement.’... Revolutionary regimes are contradictory in their relationship with authority, arising out of subversion and attracting natural rebels and bohemians; therefore as they become the establishment, they find it hard to accept that they are now the natural subject of satire. There are obvious parallels with today’s ‘clapter’, and the new type of comedy that aims to mock only the rural, old and reactionary. This kind of anti-comedy makes no real attempt to poke fun at the genuinely powerful, the people who could lose you your job or your friends, nor to take aim at the absurdities of the new regime or break its taboos. It is really just the same party-approved humour, aimed at laughing at those left behind by the Revolution."
Meme - "I have all kinds of Facebook friends. Tankies, anarchists, ancoms, liberals"
"But you don't have any right wing friends."
"No, I mentioned the liberals."
Tankies considering liberals right wingers. But tankies want to kill each other anyway
The unrealistic part is thinking commies would proudly have liberals as friends rather than wanting to send them to the guillotine (along with everyone else they disagree with)
Rob Henderson on X - "The people most committed to communism in the Soviet Union weren’t the workers—it was the educated elite. A retrospective study conducted in the 1990s titled "Work Ethics and the Collapse of the Soviet System," examined which groups were most supportive of the Soviet system. The researchers found that, compared to factory workers and semi-skilled laborers, individuals in white-collar positions—especially those with higher levels of education—were significantly more likely to express loyalty to the Communist Party. In some cases, support was two to three times higher among elites. In other words, the strongest support for the system came not from those at the bottom, but from those in relatively advantaged positions within it. This runs counter to the common assumption that egalitarian or redistributive ideologies are primarily driven by the least well-off. In practice, they are often most strongly endorsed by people closer to the top of the social hierarchy—those who benefit from the system’s institutional structure, or who are positioned to navigate it successfully"
Time to mock poor people for voting against their interests
Kyle Becker on X - "This is a critical point about socialism. "Workers" don't support it. Elites do. They hate markets because they provide accountability. They hate private property because it limits their economic clout. They hate individual rights because they limit power. It has nothing to do with whether or not capitalist economy works for "the masses." Socialist economy works for the elites. That's why they support it. Multiple studies show that economic freedom not only leads to more wealth, but more economic equality. A middle class is built in a market economy. It is destroyed in a socialist economy. That leads to misery, poverty, and oppression. It's not a historical accident. That's what happens under socialism."
Handre on X - "Tanzania's forced collectivization under Julius Nyerere killed more people per capita than Stalin's agricultural disasters, yet Western intellectuals still romanticize ujamaa as "African socialism." Between 1967 and 1975, Nyerere's government forcibly relocated over 13 million Tanzanians—roughly 80% of the rural population—into collective villages called ujamaa. The state promised modern amenities, shared prosperity, and liberation from "capitalist exploitation." Instead, they delivered mass starvation. Agricultural output collapsed by 50% within five years. Food imports skyrocketed from 50,000 tons in 1970 to 400,000 tons by 1974. Rural villagers who had fed themselves for generations suddenly couldn't grow enough grain to survive winter. The mechanics were predictably Austrian. When you destroy private property rights and eliminate price signals, you obliterate the knowledge that makes agriculture work. Farmers knew their local soil, rainfall patterns, and crop rotations. But central planners in Dar es Salaam decided that "scientific socialism" trumped centuries of accumulated farming wisdom. They forced communities to abandon fertile ancestral lands for designated plots that bureaucrats selected from maps. Villages that resisted faced military force—troops literally burned homes to drive families into the collectives. And the damn tragedy continues reverberating today. Tanzania remains one of Africa's poorest countries, importing food despite having some of the continent's best agricultural land. Per capita income in 2023 sits at $1,192—lower than Bangladesh. You can draw a straight line from ujamaa's destruction of property rights to Tanzania's persistent poverty. But mention this at any development economics conference and watch professors explain how Nyerere had "good intentions" and the real problem was "insufficient implementation."
Lesson: Collectivism fails equally hard across race, language, geography, population size, education level, continent, or any other possible metric you can dream of."
Emil Kirkegaard on X - "Socialism with African characteristics didn't work much better than socialism with Chinese or Russian characteristics."
Devon Eriksen on X - "At last, the relevant question. Here's how it works.
1. Communism is when depraved freaks make it illegal to be normal, and kill all the successful people.
2. Fascism is when normie dullards make it illegal to be weird, and kill all the bright and creative people.
The depraved freaks from #1 think they are the bright and creative people from #2. They are not. All those people gyrating half-naked in front of children at pride parades think they are Oscar Wilde, but they aren't. When societies become highly permissive, the productive weirdos, the ones who simply can't fit in because they are creative in useful ways, become surrounded by, outnumbered by, a horde of cargo-cult imitators. These people imagine themselves to be creative free spirits, because they compete to be as freaky as possible. They do not understand that freaky behavior is not creative talent... it is only a side effect of creative talent. Often these people are defective and useless, which is why they seek to use freakiness to camouflage themselves as creative, hoping to hide their uselessness. This progresses until normies get disgusted with them, and start thinking fascism might be a good idea. Then they kill everyone. This wipes out all the depraved freaks from #1, but it also wipes out Oscar Wilde, Alan Turing, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, etc, as described in #2. Because normie dullards can't tell the difference, especially when their blood is up. I understand why a lot of the right is educating itself about Wiemar Germany and re-examining fascism as a response to those conditions. The impulse makes sense. Disgust is an entirely appropriate emotional response right now. But they don't understand that even if it has rational origins, fascism, like communism, is a process that spirals out of control.
Fascism isn't just an expression of disgust. It is an ever-increasing hypersensitivity to disgust, created by a social and cultural echo chamber. Once it eliminates the original objects of disgust, it moves on to find more mildly disgusting things to target. Eventually, any deviation from the norm, however trivial and harmless, becomes an object of disgust to be eradicated. It begins with getting rid of Harvey Weinstein... but it progresses to getting rid of Richard Feynman and Elon Musk. That sentence may sound strange to you. Feynman? Musk? Really?
But remember that the Gay Race Communism that now become the state religion of the political class progressed the same way. Barack Obama, the 2008 presidential candidate, was against state recognition of homosexual marriages. At the time, that was too much, too far. Things progressed. Slopes really are slippery. It isn't a fallacy at all. The whole reason we characterize things as slopes is that a slope is a thing people tend to fall down. We notice things lead to other things, because the Overton window shifts, and we correctly characterize certain metaphorical terrain as a "slope". And just as the political class, Hollywood, and their pet idiots in NYC and LA spiraled into Gay Race Communism, the Middle American normal person backlash carries the risk of spiraling the opposite way. Remember that fascist societies aren't actually perfectly healthy cultures that suddenly, for no reason at all, get destroyed by their neighbors. What they do is they attack everyone they can see, once their disgust threshold becomes so low that every other type of society appears to them as nothing but a plague vector that must be wiped out. So their neighbors are forced to destroy them in self-defense.
We, as a society, are currently in danger of both communism and fascism. The risk of communism is that it's what we will get if we do not purge the political class. The risk of fascism is that it's what we will get if that purge spirals out of control. Everyone reading this already understands that communism is the worst thing in the known universe... because anyone who doesn't understand that has muted/blocked/unfollowed me long ago. But we also need to understand the dangers of our own response. If we do not use and focus our disgust, we are doomed to a communist future. But we must make that disgust our servant, not our master."
Swann Marcus on X - "My favorite thing about "late stage capitalism" is that the term was invented in the 1920s Any day now, guys! Any day capitalism will really end because of its internal contradictions! We've been saying this 150 years, but we're serious for reals this time!"
rosie ๐ on X - "the left treats “the revolution” the same way the right treats “the rapture”"
Lauren Chen on X - "It's crazy to me how Robin Hood is now popularized as "stealing from the rich to give to the poor" (Socialist messaging) In reality, Robin Hood stole back the taxes that a cruel leader unjustly levied against the population (Anti-socialist messaging)"
Meme - Soyjak: "Capitalism causes cyclical financial crysis."
"Republic of [Place]. *gdp/capita going up over time to be much higher at the end than the start*"
"Democratic Socialist People's Republic of [Place] Time. *gdp/capita barely going up over time to be only a bit higher at the end than the start*"
Soyjak: "Much better!"
Common Sense Extremists on X - "Robert Duvall refused to work with Spielberg and DreamWorks again after Spielberg visited Fidel Castro in 2002, noting the hypocrisy of him making films like Schindlers List while visiting a dictator. RIP."
Make Economics a College Requirement to Help Fight Socialism - WSJ - "After nearly two decades of teaching American politics, I’ve noticed a striking shift among my students. They’re arriving to campus not only skeptical of free markets, but openly embracing democratic socialist ideas. The problem isn’t that students have rejected capitalism. It’s that many have never been taught how it works or why it matters. When we discuss housing, inequality or wages in my course on politics and geography, my students come to conclusions quickly and confidently: Rent control is necessary. Housing is a human right. Markets have failed. But when I ask simple follow-up questions, such as how housing actually gets built if returns are capped, the class goes silent. These aren’t weak students. The issue is that they aren’t debating economic ideas; they’re blindly inheriting them. This is a failure of curriculum, not intelligence. Up to three-quarters of college students never take an economics course, and only about 3% of colleges require one. By the time students encounter formal economic reasoning, if they ever do, their moral intuitions and political frameworks are already set. Those frameworks aren’t emerging in a vacuum. They’re shaped by a cultural ecosystem that delivers simple, emotionally compelling claims habitually amplified on social media: The system is rigged. You’ll never get ahead. Billionaires shouldn’t exist. Capitalism harms the masses. These arguments travel well because they’re moral and immediate. They require no understanding of trade-offs... Recent surveys show a majority of Americans under 30 now view socialism favorably, while far fewer feel favorable toward capitalism. In New York, Zohran Mamdani’s victory was powered by younger voters backing rent freezes, expanded public provision and redistribution of wealth. In Seattle, similar dynamics have elevated candidates who speak the same moral language. These outcomes are the predictable result of an education system that fails to teach students the basic tenets of economic literacy... The study of statistics matters, too. In a world saturated with data, students must be able to distinguish correlation from causation and evaluate competing claims. Without this capacity, even well-intentioned arguments can mislead. And we’d continue sending young people into a world of complex economic questions and social policy challenges armed only with slogans. The goal is exposure, not indoctrination. Students should encounter the best arguments on all sides and be equipped to evaluate them. If some ultimately prefer democratic socialism, they could at least provide a reasoned explanation"
Left wingers were complaining about this (posted under "How one professor stumps his students when they defend democratic socialism"), claiming that just because students couldn't answer the questions on the spot didn't mean that their ideas weren't bankrupt and trying to paint the professor as a bad person. Clearly, if you criticise the left wing agenda, you're a bad person
Meme - *Cycle with tankie with hammer and sickle crushing his skull*
"Make some nonsense claim. Somebody corrects you. Call them a bootlicker."
Meme - "American leftists when they find out the 'hammer and sickle' represents workers, and they'd still need a job after the 'revolution'. *triggered blue-haired person (including eyebrows) with lots of piercings*"
Meme - "Communism. There will always be that 1% that will say "If they only did this... it would have worked", to them I say "From the day of our birth we tried, our parents tried, our grandparents tried for seventy years we tried, and all we accomplished was to create a more unbearable form of hell." - Daniel Vitek, Survivor"
Commie Trucker on X - "I’ve worked 50-60 hours a week for the last 20 years in order to support my family, while my employers have gotten rich off my labor. Yet I’m lazy and entitled and my bosses are entrepreneurial and hardworking."
Kix on X - "The beauty of capitalism is you can build whatever you want, including communist style companies. There a dozens of large, billion dollar + revenue companies in the US that are 100% employee owned. Mondragon Corporation has 70,000 employees and is not only 100% employee owned but each employee = 1 vote in a democratic governance process to control the company. The world is your oyster. You can literally create your communist utopia inside of capitalism. The problem is that to create that, you need to be willing to take risk, sell others on your vision, and work really hard. Too much work and risk for 99.999% of communist believers. So instead they want to dismantle and destroy everything in the hopes they slightly increase their quality of life. History says the opposite happens."
The cope is that capitalists sabotage communism, which is why it never works. Of course, the fact that even communist countries are so weak that capitalists can always sabotage them is unremarked upon (as is the fact that communists sabotage and sabotaged capitalism but have never managed to destroy it - just subvert it)
phillip dorsett on X - "the US hasn’t been working to sabotage and overthrow communism around the clock 24/7/365 for 100 years in every region on earth because it “doesn’t work,” Dottie. They do it because if they don’t….it will work everywhere. And once it does, humanity will never go back to this"
Communism weakens your country so capitalism can successfully sabotage it. Capitalism strengthens it so communists can't sabotage it
One communist claimed not just that modern China was communist, but that North Korea was more democratic than the US. There's no limit to how deluded and insane commies are
Handre on X - "General Ne Win seized power in Burma in 1962 and immediately launched "the Burmese Way to Socialism," transforming Asia's rice bowl into a laboratory for economic destruction. He nationalized every major industry, banned private enterprise, severed trade relationships, and handed economic planning to bureaucrats who had never grown a grain of rice or balanced a ledger. The results arrived swiftly and brutally. Burma's rice exports, once feeding much of Asia, collapsed as state planners allocated resources based on political connections rather than market signals. Black markets flourished while official stores sat empty. The currency became worthless paper as central planners printed money to fund their fantasies. Education deteriorated as resources flowed to party apparatus instead of schools and universities. Within a generation, Ne Win transformed one of Southeast Asia's wealthiest nations into one of the world's poorest. Living standards plummeted. Shortages became permanent features of daily life. The country that once exported food to its neighbors couldn't feed its own people. Free market economists predicted exactly this outcome, but Ne Win's advisors dismissed market mechanisms as capitalist propaganda. By 1988, mass protests finally forced the regime to abandon its socialist experiment, but the damage was done. Twenty-six years of central planning had destroyed the accumulated capital, knowledge, and institutions that make prosperity possible. Every socialist claims their system will work differently this time. The laws of economics don't bend to political will."
Kurt Belgard MD on X - "The laws of economics that doom socialism are really just the laws of human nature. It is why totalitarian socialism kills so many as it tries to kill off those whose nature doesn't fit it, but they never reach the end of that because those qualities are characteristic of man."
Jim Davis 1776 on X - "Who can forget the New Soviet Man? They believed they could change the fundamental nature of Mankind. The hubris is mindnumbing. But they had a lot of faith in themselves."
Handre on X - "The Plymouth Pilgrims accidentally ran the first documented socialist experiment in America three centuries before Marx scribbled his manifesto. Governor William Bradford's "common storehouse" system from 1620-1623 delivered textbook collectivist results: mass shirking, crop failures, and near-starvation. Bradford recorded the disaster in detail. Young men "complained that they were oppressed" when forced to work for others without reward. Productive colonists watched lazy neighbors receive equal rations despite contributing nothing. The system "was found to breed much confusion and discontent" because it violated basic human incentives. People starved while fertile Massachusetts soil lay underworked. The turnaround came swiftly in 1623 when Bradford abandoned the collective model and assigned private family plots. Production exploded overnight. Women and children voluntarily joined field work when their families directly benefited from extra effort. The same colonists who nearly died under socialism suddenly produced abundant harvests under private property. Bradford explicitly credited private ownership for saving Plymouth Colony. He documented how individual responsibility transformed human behavior within a single growing season. Individual effort cannot be separated from individual reward without destroying both. Every socialist experiment since Plymouth has repeated this identical pattern. Different century, different continent, same predictable collapse when planners ignore the reality of human nature. No matter what they call it, whenever and wherever collectivist ideas are put into practice, disaster soon follows."
Handre on X - "In 1843, a group of socialist vegans bought a farm in Massachusetts and declared it a transcendentalist utopia. What could go wrong? The Fruitlands commune collapsed within seven months because ideological purity cannot feed human stomachs or organize economic production. Bronson Alcott's experiment banned money, animal products, and apparently common sense while expecting 90 acres to sustain a community through New England winter. Alcott recruited transcendentalist dreamers who had never farmed but possessed strong opinions about spiritual agriculture. They refused animal labor for plowing, rejected manure as fertilizer, and spent harvest season attending philosophy lectures instead of gathering crops. When October arrived, they had planted late, harvested little, and stored almost nothing for winter. Their ideology forbade the market mechanisms that could have saved them. The community's anti-money stance meant no price signals, no profit motive, and no rational allocation of scarce resources. Without property rights, nobody owned responsibility for specific tasks. Without market prices, they couldn't calculate which crops would feed the most people or generate trade value with neighboring farms. Alcott traveled constantly giving speeches while his family and followers faced starvation. By January 1844, members fled to towns where evil capitalism provided food, shelter, and paying work. The commune's collapse wasn't bad luck or poor weather - it was economic law in action. You cannot organize production through wishful thinking and moral lectures. Even the most devoted ideologues eventually choose survival over starvation when reality intervenes. Every socialist experiment faces this identical problem, whether it's 90 acres in Massachusetts or 90 million people in the Soviet Union."
Damn capitalism always sabotaging socialism because it's too successful!
Nancy Pearcey on X - "The Pilgrims' experiment in socialism illustrates "the tragedy of the commons": When you own something outright, you capture 100% of the gains from taking care of it and bear 100% of the costs from neglecting or mismanaging it. That creates incentives to do your best. But communal ownership shatters this incentive structure. Why invest personal time and money when you do not benefit from your efforts -- while others free-ride on your work?"
Handre on X - "Brook Farm stands as one of history's most perfect controlled experiments in voluntary socialism; and its spectacular failure proves every principle of free market economics. Picture this: 1841 Massachusetts. The brightest minds of the Transcendentalist movement, including Nathaniel Hawthorne as an investor, decide to escape "capitalist drudgery" by creating their perfect commune. These weren't your typical utopian cranks. They were educated elites who genuinely believed intellectual superiority could overcome economic reality. The experiment started as a joint-stock egalitarian community where residents rotated between farm work and domestic duties. Manual labor for Harvard types. When that predictably struggled, they pivoted to French socialist Charles Fourier's "phalanx" model — shared labor, shared profits, shared everything. The intellectuals attracted other luminaries who bought into the romantic vision of escaping market-based work allocation. Reality had other plans. Financial losses mounted as bookish idealists discovered that good intentions don't harvest crops efficiently. Internal squabbles erupted when people faced the eternal socialist problem: who decides who does what, and who gets what? The final blow came when their massive Phalanstery building burned down with zero insurance coverage. By 1847, they sold everything at auction. Brook Farm collapsed despite every advantage socialism could ask for: voluntary participation, educated residents, shared ideology, and zero government coercion. Collectivist economics cannot work even when willing, intelligent people attempt it. The iron laws of human action and economic calculation operate in their purest form."
Noah Smith ๐๐บ๐ธ๐บ๐ฆ๐น๐ผ on X - "I am concerned that the Dems are becoming the party of "millionaires who resent billionaires". "I made my millions fair and square, but you cheated and exploited the workers to make your billions, you capitalist pig!""
Rothmus ๐ด on X - "This is a striking pattern among many prominent leftist leaders: they were overwhelmingly born into relative privilege.
>Engels was born into a wealthy industrialist family
>Marx was the son of a prosperous lawyer who enjoyed a comfortable middle-class life
>Lenin came from a privileged background and his father held noble status as a high-ranking education official, and his mother was the daughter of a wealthy physician who owned multiple estates
>Castro was the son of a wealthy Spanish landowner. He grew up on a large sugar plantation and attended elite Jesuit schools
>Che had aristocratic ancestry, grew up with servants, and received a privileged education
>Pol Pot was raised in a prosperous farming family with ties to the Cambodian royal palace. He attended elite French-influenced schools and later studied in Paris
>The same pattern holds for the Fabian socialists in Britain. Figures such as Beatrice Webb, Sidney Webb, and George Bernard Shaw all came from comfortable backgrounds or married into wealth. They were openly described as a clique of bourgeois socialists, and the term “champagne socialists” was originally coined in reference to them
Despite the rhetoric, the modern left has never truly been a spontaneous movement of the working class or the poor. It has more often been a movement of the haves against the have-mores. Led by the privileged, funded by the privileged, and aimed at reshaping society to suit their vision."
Kay on X - "Communists were the ones that overthrew the Nazis. lol. So you guys were the Nazis all along"
Kraut on X - "The first people the communists murdered in Czechoslovakia was the leader of the anti-Nazi resistance Milada Horakova, and the leader of the allied exile army Helidor Pika. In every European country they seized power, the first people they murdered were those who fought the Nazis"
Meme - "r/socialism
Serious question about wealth distribution
Why don't people who are already socialist / collectivist get together with other people who are also socialist / collectivist, pool their all assets and income and then split it evenly amongst all participants?"
"What would that achieve?"
