By the way, Reaganism has been centrism since Reagan. Where have you been?

Way more edgy than socialists are the self-proclaimed "anarchists" on my FB feed who are still in college and completely dependent on the university and their parents for their livelihood.

seize the means of sass production

only one person is making eyes roll here

Hey, remember that time the US military executed some American college students because they didn't like an unpopular war?


...Anyway, what were we talking about again? Oh yes. An American socialist's gallows humor about being violently suppressed by his government. Yawn. What an eyeroll.

Man the world must feel a lot different if you don't know anything about history or economics. I bet I wouldn't be a socialist either.

Well, you do have the benefit of being a socialist that doesn't really have to live as one.

This, for example. You don't know the difference between state capitalism and socialism. That makes your choice easy and also moral. The system you live under is the best, and you can point wildly in any direction and say "that's worse", because you don't know any different.

“One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.”

I don't understand why more people don't give my system for society a try. I call it The Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, and it's even better than socialism.

(We're based in San Francisco at the moment, but with plans to move to a different location.)

Branch Floridian.

Marshall McLuhan?

well, yeah... you! That's what I keep pointing out.

So the Kent State victims are socialist martyrs now? Huh.

When socialists start getting gunned down in the streets by their government for advocating single-payer then maybe I'll see recognize as a persecuted minority people who call themselves "socialists" because they want a more robust welfare system akin to Denmark's. But until then, I don't see how Reid's juvenile provocations ("better shoot me") could really be called "gallows humor." What threat, what desperate situation, what imminent hardship is he about to suffer that he needs to make light of because it's so severe that it's the only way to cope with it? Some people have exaggerated and unrealistic opinions about just how transgressive their opinions are.

Instead what I'm seeing is that the Democratic party is eager to integrate leftist ideas into its platform.

You are incredibly bad at pattern recognition.

damn dude

I mean okay sure the US government has a history of violently suppressing anti-war activists, anti-fascist activists, black civil right activists, feminists, communists, socialists, and labor rights activists, but because Reid has not personally experienced violent suppression yet it means he has nothing to worry about.

I refuse to acknowledge these so-called "socialists" as potential victims of government persecution.

What the **** is a red scare?

No you don't understand, you just don't understand you ****ing retard. The Kent State students were protesting the expansion of the Vietnam war into Cambodia. That's totally different from socialism. You can't extrapolate from a history of violent reprisal against people who exercise their right to free speech unless the people who were killed were LITERALLY saying the exact same thing, and were also LITERALLY the exact same people and wearing LITERALLY the exact same clothes. It's different. It just is. If you're too stupid to understand that then clearly you have not seen me roll my eyes enough.

after you're done pretending people are with you, go read up on COINTELPRO and FBI activities against socialists

Oh look more libelous fiction

Now watch me infantilize Reid and all other socialists as fakes who just want free healthcare.

You aren't a REAL socialist unless your beliefs are so radical and anti-democratic that they are bluntly unachievable. Anything more or less than unachievable is fake socialism and must be eyerolled.

No, that's quite far from what I'm saying. I've already made my point repeatedly but you seem more interested in calling me names than responding to it.

Many people who call themselves socialists are slammed by conservatives, who say banal stuff, such as: "Soviet Russia was socialist and look how that turned out!"

In response, they say, "well, no, I don't think of socialism in those terms. I don't want a controlled economy, for example, and I certainly don't want gulags. When I use the word 'socialism', I have in mind something like the nordic model of socialism."

So they effectively have in mind higher taxes and a more robust healthcare system. That is, they effectively want to roll the Democratic party to the period before the Reagan revolution aligned both parties with big business, and the Democratic party increasingly distanced itself from organized labor.

But that's not a very radical view. Even though socialism has been a term that has been stigmatized in American politics for decades, its important for some of these self-identified socialists to own the terminology, even though, say, in the 1960s or 1970s, no one would've used the word "socialist" to describe a single-payer healthcare system -- now a hallmark of "socialism". Using the term is an act of defiance, and an unnecessary one at that. Identifying as a socialist, for many, is nothing more than an affectation that's part of a larger identity, one that goes with Chapo Trap House-style sarcasm.

Obviously I don't mean you here, Jon.

I'm not denying that socialists have been victims of state-sanctioned violence. I'm saying that there are a lot of sham socialists out there.

Well Americans can't tell the two apart anymore, so I guess they're in it with the rest of us now.

settle down

Yes, and not David Foster Wallace like I originally thought, as you pointed out before....

The "US Military" did not "execute" Americans. You can't take the actions of a few individuals acting against orders and impose that as action with institutional intent. It was the result of dumb, overly aggressive leadership, but it directly lead to a rethink of tactics and training for crowd control.

Honestly, there are way better examples if you go back further, but they are less relevant to today. They do, in my mind, underscore one of the reasons the second amendment is valuable. Citizens aren't going to win an all out war with the military, but an armed mob of people is a hell of a lot more dangerous and difficult to deal with than an unarmed one. It makes the powers that be think twice before pissing people off too badly.

There's definitely plenty of dilettante socialists or anarchists or whatever else out there, but you can't really police people's sincerity about those things, I think. Yeah, someone may be a pretty "edgy" (please no) undergrad anarchist currently living off the grace of their parents and the state, but being (partially or temporarily?) hypocritical doesn't mean they don't genuinely believe what they're professing, or that they're not in the awkward formative stages of a new mindset. I firmly believe that people shouldn't look at their cell phones while driving, and will call people out for it, but I still occasionally glance at mine to thumbs-up a song that's playing on shuffle or something.

Someone can call themselves a socialist and not have answers to every question, or may not fully embrace X, Y, or Z tenets of True Socialism, but the thrust of the idea, the overarching principles of it, may seem right and good enough to them to head in that direction and say they're doing so.

Police track left-wing groups all of the time. They do for right-wing groups as well, but generally the belief is they're more aggressive towards the left wing and more passive towards the right.

Just look at the recen FOIA requests regarding BLM. The FBI basically considers every person involved in BLM a potential terrorist. This while they're literally discussing how to keep white supremacist rallies from being targetted.

Are you accusing me of advocating social democracy under the name socialism?

You're right! It is me who should simply stop looking at FB, if my own voyeuristic impressions of what are possibly evolving mindsets really annoy me that much.

Now, some of the memes really do make me cringe, and I believe justifiably so, but then again I am sure we all know this can be true for any kind of meme.

Perhaps this is because left-wing activists tend to do things like destroy property or get into arguments with law enforcement, whereas right-wing activists tend to meet secretly at night in white robes (or on 4chan in the comfort of their own homes): in other words, it's going to be hard to tell apart potential right wing terrorists from your typical Caucasian gun owner, unless you start penetrating deeply into some of these militia-themed sleeper cells (which I am sure has happened in the past, much to the consternation of such people, e.g., Ruby Ridge).

No, I'm saying that what many call social democracy is actually liberalism (albeit mid-20th century American liberalism rather than late 20th century liberalism), and that many socialists want to brand their liberalism as socialism for various reasons, some of which are more superficial than others, but none of which are compatible with the idea that identity as a socialist of this kind puts a mark on your back. In fact, this sort of politics is actually ascendant, however important it is for leftists to insist that they're views are invariably marginalized.

Man, this is a really interesting juxtaposition.

they are marginalized. is that really a question? it's taken a huge amount of effort to get the democratic party to maybe start suggesting that single payer isn't awful. and single payer isn't even a far left view. if you're to the left of social democracy, you effectively are marginalized.

didn't california recently ban communist party members or something from holding government positions? or there was a serious movement for that. something, i didn't dig too deeply.

right-wing activists are more likely to have cop friends and cover up their murders, I suppose, so they're harder to track than people.

Yeah, CA government employees can be fired for being communists. Lol, not marginalized.

Even a member of the American National Socialists wouldn't be fired on the spot just for political affiliation.

Let's not forget the Communist Control Act of 1954. The Communist Party couldn't even legally defend itself.

Remind me of a time when Nazism has ever been explicitly banned in U.S. law.