An embarrassing number of things get me way too worked up, but right at the top of the list is saying healthcare shouldn’t be accessible to all. To say that by phrasing your response with an absolute obscene level of racism is a whole new level. But I suppose we shouldn’t expect anything less from the footsoldiers of fascism.
I think even the average American liberal would agree that healthcare is a human right
I live in the UK and because of my type 1 diabetes all my prescriptions are free.
It’s madness to charge for something someone needs to live. Captive audience to the extreme.
You are lucky. USA makes you pay for everything.
I cant afford my medication anymore and now i just deal with the withdrawl and horrible pain. If i had just chosen to be a NEET instead of working at a coal mine this wouldnt have happened to me. Im tired.
We charge about 8 quid per perscription. But you can buy monthly or yearly packages that make it cheaper if you get loads.
So my ones would cost around £50 a month if I had to pay.
Certain deseases, pregnancy, children, being on benefits and a few other things make them all free.
Asthmatic here that gets 3 inhalers every month. It could be £31.25 a month or £375 a year, or, because of the prepaid certificate, I pay for any and all prescriptions for £11 a month.
Are there barriers with claiming, like lengthy forms? Or was it straightforward to apply?
It shouldn’t be surprising that a couple days after this they made this post.
For anyone who isn’t familiar, this is a play on the fourteen words. (ETA: white supremacist shit)
I checked and was mildly surprised to learn that it was real. I was expecting a propertarian to be subtler than that.
idk why they always think “basic human needs should be free” somehow means “the people providing for these needs must be compelled to do it for free.” Like even under our current system right now there are doctors who accept Medicare and Medicaid. Do they think these doctors don’t get paid and just see these patients for free? Were they forced into it? Dumbest shit ever.
They don’t think that’s what it means. They know it means publicly funded. They just don’t want to pay for it because they know the rich will be fitting the bill. Don’t give them that much credit, they’re not as dumb as they want you to think.
I live in NH. It’s fucked here. Split between rich arrogant snobs that act like they are down for equality but only make moves via Facebook profile overlays and Nazis, and conservatives that are just wrecklessly psychopaths.
It’s hell for anyone that doesn’t fit those two.
We have little Nazi fucks dropping banners on the highway and surrounding gay cafes and theathers calling people paedophiles.
NH is a shit hole of ignorance and nobody does anything at all about it. Both sides hate if anyone trys to point out the obvious they try to hide from.
Some trashy pro trump career criminal steals from my family and cops just laugh at me when I ask for help.
It’s really fucking up my view of America as a whole…
And it’s not just Nazis and dumb politics… I know too many career criminals that get ahead while good kids suffer for living with basic human decency.
Is it really that bad? I’m thinking of moving there from Ohio because gestures vaguely at middle america.
Compared to much of the US it is better, but it is the Florida of New England
What’s the opposite of a mask off moment? Like, putting on groucho marx glasses over your klan hood.
Has anyone noticed the weird surge in pro-slavery sentiment? I’ve seen people, including black propel, defending slavery recently and it’s mind blowing! They claim that enslaved people learned work ethic and important life skills, that some slave owners treated the enslaved like family. These same arguments are being made about the concentration camps during the holocaust too!
Ron DeSuckMyDick in Florida signed off on legislation that changed the way slavery is talked about in Florida schools. That’s where a lot of this seems to have started.
Didn’t DeFascist also make it a thing that teachers can/should show PragerU videos in class?
PragerU claimed that but I haven’t seen anything from the state
They claim everything under the goddamn sun, I swear.
I think the amount of people defending are just being amplified by the media. I used to see the Confederate flag way more often. I think defense of slavery is probably going down but we just hear about it more often now
Free as in free beer vs free as in freedom. Two different words entirely.
You can use libre to distinguish the latter meaning
Do they not understand that by free we mean paid for by taxes?
That might be the point they are (terribly) trying to make: that taxing people (i) takes away their choice/freedom and (ii) forces taxpayers to fund the ‘lifestyle’ of others. It’s the populist version of Hayek-Nozick.
The government probably paid that farmer to grow that crop in the first place.
If they’re ideologically consistent then they’d argue that taxation is theft. And since they seem to think that slavery is wrong purely because the individual is being deprived of pay, then they’d probably say that taxation is morally equivalent to slavery as well.
They’re wrong, but they’d probably say that.
I dont agree with communism but id say im pretty close to that(socialist prob) but this is such a bruh moment.
What don’t you with about communism?
I think people would just lose motivation. I lived in ireland for 5 years and they basically had ubi and people wouldnt get jobs they would just sit in lawnchairs in parks and then buy a some food, alcohol and a new iphone out of it. Still no job, house or anything else. I think food and basic housing should be a right but if you want a proper phone, a nice car (aka stuff) you should work for it. Income should be “capped” with tax. If a ceo earns 10 or 100 times what a cashier earns its not a problem compared to todaus world where a ceo earns a million times more than a cashier. And all that tax money could go to housing, food for the poor, infrastructure, free public transport so people dont get cut off from better paying jobs, etc. I think it would be a pretty solid system if implemented right but im just a random teenager so i have no say.
You seem pretty open minded, I think you would find a couple of these videos interesting, by a youtuber called Second Thought if you’ve heard of them.
Here he directly addresses the claim that people won’t work under communism : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9CFP_58mBc
From the sounds of it I could probably safely call you a Social Democrat, he has a video on that topic here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRq3pl17C8M
Our goal is not equality or UBI, it’s to first meet everyone’s basic needs and then help everyone reach their own personal potential. If people own their own labor they are more likely to be motivated to work. Ireland still has a dictatorship at work and that’s why people take the excuse to not work. Marx’s original goal was to make work life’s prime want. If through socialist culture people are encouraged to learn as much as they can about whatever they want people will take up jobs they really like. No brilliant artist will be forced to work a sucky fast food job because their art isn’t profitable. No one will have to be a doctor or lawyer and hate it but continue because it pays. People don’t like to not work. They will at least put labor in to hobbies, games, and community once most things are automated. Even then people can work if they want. There will and have indeed be/en bonuses for and luxuries for people who work extra hard in socialist countries too. Capitalism hinders people’s desire to work by exploiting them for capital and commodifying everything. If people can help themselves and their community by working harder they will. “No innovation under socialism” is a common anti-communist argument and can easily be debunked by the fact that the USSR went from peasant backwater to industrial superpower in a few decades without colonialism, and they went on to send the first satellite, dog, man, and woman to space, along with first crafts to the moon and mars. They also invented the internet (which they unfortunately did not see the potential of) and mobile phones.
Even in capitalist Ireland with UBI the large majority of people work
Different person, but my issue with communism is that it puts too much power in the hands of government, which, thus far, has always led to some abusive power figure corrupting the whole thing for personal gain. It’s a wonderful theory, I’m just not convinced humanity will ever be able to make it actually work long term.
That said, I definitely think we should be dabbling with it, and moving more and more power out of the hands of corporations. There’s a balance in there somewhere.
The goal of a lot of anti-communist propaganda is to make you believe that these people are autocrats, but that’s not true. They’re democratically elected and unlike in liberal democracy when some dickhead politician reveals that they lied to your face and now you have to put up with them for the next 4 years regardless, communist party members can be recalled from their position at any time if the party believes they’re not fulfilling the role to the benefit of society.
People are capable of having power and remaining true to the people. Though it’s true some of the leaders of the USSR eventually became estranged from the people and ended up illegally dismantling it, Stalin and his comrades were paid the same as a normal worker and he died with nothing but the clothes on his back. We can and are learning from the mistakes of the past so we can do better in the future. China’s leaders have remained principled and that’s how they managed to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty and crack down on corrupt corporations and politicians. Scientific socialism will continue to learn from our mistakes and avoid them in the future. Also, If communists were out for power why would we side with the oppressed (not that you’re necessarily insinuating we are just “power hungry authoritarians” or something like that).
Absolutely, I agree. Let me clarify, I don’t think all people are secretly evil or anything, or that power corrupts all, my feelings are more that positions of immense power attract a certain type. I completely believe that we can have a moral leader, who means well and does all they can, but how do you setup a system like that with longevity? How do you check and balance that kind of power in the long term, when someone takes it who does want to corrupt it, and will say anything to get their way, and has the support of the average person?
A generation or two of prosperity doesn’t interest me if it creates all the tools and power for long lasting dystopia.
Also, just to be crystal clear (although I don’t think you’re insinuating this either), in no way do I think communists are out for power, or ill intentioned in the slightest. I would’ve said I’m communist myself a decade ago, but after a while of watching corrupt pastors, politicians, and businessman weasel their way into incredible power, and how they’ll say one thing and do another, the more convinced I become of the need for a system that limits the power in any one place.
Lastly, I’m not so sure about China? Do feel free to share some resources, maybe I’m exclusively hearing the bad here, but aren’t they involved in Uyghur genocide, and a country with some of the worst privacy imaginable? I’m still interested to hear about their political theory, but it doesn’t seem like a government I’d want to live in.
There are many tools that we can use to avoid degeneration such as democratic centralism and criticism and self criticism. The fall of the USSR wasn’t inevitable I think it could have been avoided if the Khrushchev coup didn’t happen, as well as other mistakes. We can study those mistakes and avoid them like China is. China has studied their mistakes intensely, and that’s why they’ve managed to stay around and continue to improve people’s lives. In terms of the “Uyghur genocide” it is a fabrication of the western media. Basically, the US trained jihadis in the Middle East and many happened to be Uyghur. The terrorism was brought home to China and instead of killing hundreds of thousands like the US after 9/11, China organized education and de-radicalization programs. The media has spread the lie that genocide was being committed there instead with dubious sources like (CIA) radio free Asia and (CIA) Adrian Zenz. Many visitors from Islamic countries testified there was no genocide happening. I believe these programs are since closed. We have many resources here on Lemmygrad.ml if you use the search function like this. On the surveillance thing what I’ll say is the US has more per capita CCTV cameras. I’d love to live in China especially because according to Harvard over 90% of people support their government there.. If you want to learn about Socialism With Chinese Characteristics I’d suggest Roland Boers book on the subject and some more resources here and here.
About Uyghur “genocide”, check this https://archive.ph/sYD5q#selection-2093.20-2093.27
In case you don’t know, Adrian Zen is the guy most western media base their sources from.
An excerpt on “2 million” number:
Adrian Zenz’s study is a bit more complicated to debunk because there is an actual “study” to look at. After taking some time to look at the actual study and doing some research on Adrian Zenz, one can quickly find out that he does not have a history in conducting academically approved papers. He has not received education in statistics related subjects and he has a long track record of making some very “questionable” claims. He claimed that he is “sent by God to punish Beijing,” and actively connects homosexuality, gender equality, and bans on corporal punishment to the power of “Antichrist.” His Wikipedia page has since removed any content regarding his “unconventional” beliefs but archives can still be found on the internet.
Regarding the actual study, there is actually nothing much of substance. Most of the paragraphs are dedicated to providing information on the geological and geographical information on Xinjiang. The conclusion of “millions of detainees” is made by interviewing merely 8 alleged former detainees. There is no further useful information in Zenz’s study on this topic. It is fair to conclude, with a relationship to his fundamentalist Christian views and track record of questionable beliefs by today’s standard, that Adrian Zenz’s study is ultimately unfit to be cited by any article.
On the so-called “genocide”: https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/18/us-media-reports-chinese-genocide-relied-on-fraudulent-far-right-researcher/
Ah, the “human nature” argument.
The saying that power corrupts and that absolutel power corrupts absolutely is wrong; it’s more accurately, as Frank Herbert said, power attracts the corruptible. Naturally there are many was to get around this, including soviet and Chinese democracy. There are a lot of resources around here that you can take a look at about those.
That said, I definitely think we should be dabbling with it, and moving more and more power out of the hands of corporations. There’s a balance in there somewhere.
I would recommend this video, it seems like you would understand our position on “Nordic style” social democracy if you watched it. Hakim - “We need a mixture of Capitalism AND Socialism” - BULLS#*T
So are you trying to say you’re a socdem or what?
Probably not that into politics
Was trying to ascertain how much they knew, if they can’t even answer if they’re a soc dem I’d have to send them to like second thought lol
Second thought is very good
yes, especially for extremely new leftists
Maybe I’m wrong for this but I don’t think recommending Youtube channels is a good idea overall. For specific questions, videos are fine but I think just actually reading easy to understand theory is a much better starting place we should recommend
idk a lot of people really resist reading works, I would never reccomend that you stop at yt vids but they can be helpful to people who aren’t really politcally educated in the slightest and plant seeds for future development
I suppose. I started reading them while being relatively educated on history and philosophy so I didn’t have too much trouble on them but if you can’t read it then it probably is better to watch a video over nothing
What does that even mean, and also why did you feel the need to qualify it here?
I think everyone can and should hate libertarianism. You dont need to be communist for it.
Top tier answer lmao
Uh… critical support. 🫡
Similarly to La Résistance, we shall unite against libertarianism on the basis of it being a far greater horror than any difference in ideology between us.
I’m from Denmark so my health care is paid through tax
To the wall.
As a type one diabetic on insulin… I am so shocked and confused by this statement 😭
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holy shit
