I relate to this heavily, especially what seems like your guilt about it which I relate to the most.

In my case I was raised in an emotionally neglectful environment which suppresses the generation of the self during childhood. As a result, I learned (unconsciously) that I personally have no inherent value, so my value to the human race was tied exactly to my “objective” provable contribution to it. If I could demonstrate my value by helping others, then perhaps one day I would earn the love from somewhere that I didn’t receive from my thoroughly traumatized parents.

There are a few problems with this trauma logic. First, it doesn’t work. People appreciate good deeds, but love and appreciation come from compatibility and trust which I learned that I don’t actually have to work toward to earn. I found that people whose relationship was based on my service to them (like I was raised to seek) aren’t actually connected to me in any way. Second, it is disturbing to live this way because it feels as dishonest as it is. It felt like I was tricking people because I actually was presenting to everyone an image which was cultivated for personal safety as a child rather than for actual connection. I could sense (due to my heightened awareness of other’s emotional states, again, for childhood safety) that others knew I wasn’t being completely genuine and could never truly connect with me. Finally, this approach generates self hatred. Why would I have to hide my true self from the world if my true self wasn’t awful and horrendous? I can tell you I have had thoughts so disturbing I would never commit them to the written word. I thought that was my true self that I had to constantly work against with my paragon persona. As I’ve been getting away from co-dependent and people pleasing behaviors and expressing myself more genuinely, those thoughts that came from me feeling isolated and cornered have lessened. Those thoughts were and are nothing more than the consequence of trauma, not my true self.

I have no idea whether you would relate to any of the above. But I can say that people don’t get to the point where you are and where I have been multiple times in my life without trauma being involved. Trauma fucks you up, makes you feel guilty, and makes you want to isolate. This makes it tricky to find others who are as fucked up by trauma as you are. I have by some fortune found a few of them. It can be incredibly cathartic to talk to other traumatized people and joke about things that the rest of the world would never willingly even think about. It also gave me some perspective. I always assumed my childhood experiences weren’t that bad because my parents always compared what they did to me to what their parents did to them which was even to a child an obviously far worse. By sharing with others what I experienced, I’ve learned that it was actually very bad, I’m not over-reacting, and it makes complete sense that I would come out the other end traumatized with the feeling that living life is a constant struggle which I would be relieved to be absolved of.

As far as systemic issues, what we’re living through now is more typical of the human experience than what our parents experienced. The world is a vastly intricate web of beauty and horrors. We have the advantage and disadvantage of not flinching at the horrors and taking them completely on. This gives us a better perspective of the world’s problems, many of which are frustratingly fixable, but also gives us the consequence which everyone else intuitively avoids. I would never suggest to anyone to bury their head in the sand, only to suggest that there is a greater reality intermixed with and beyond the horrors.

I watched a video of dozens of Palestinians joyfully dancing and celebrating with their friends and family during the height of the genocide. I can’t forget about it because even through they were living through one of the worst things which can be inflicted on a group of people, they understood that joy and community was what they were preserving and could help them all through. I’ve personally never had that, hence my solution to the problems of the world being similar to your solution. Escape them since there’s not much to lose anyway. That’s pretty sick that you and I would ever think that way and the circumstances which caused that are beyond unfair.

I’m far from out of the woods myself, but exposing the parts of myself which I’ve always been ashamed of to people who understand what we went through has hinted to me that some kind of reclamation of my right as a human being is possible. If no one has ever told you, Pete Hahnloser, you deserve to experience some measure of joy and comfort in this life and you deserve to believe that you deserve it and can have it. I’ve never had faith of been very hopeful in my life, and those things have always felt foolish to me, but I’m starting to understand why those things are important for most people. I hope you can find some comfort, whatever you decide.

Coca Cola is an old company with a long and dark history. If they appear reasonable, it’s only because they’ve used the massive weight of their resources to create an international marketing campaign over decades to make themselves appear benign and refreshing.

The liberal media wants you to think that the two volumes of liquid are equal using their woke science, but if you use your common sense, you can clearly see that the narrow tube is filled higher and therefore contains more liquid. There is nothing wrong with the economy, real Americans just need to use narrower glasses. Checkmate, leftists. /s

Cutting out the artist middleman in their money-laundering scheme. What a joke.

Most right wing conservatives I’ve talked to are concerned with family, security, economic stability and freedom. They don’t care if you live in a commune or if you want to run a redistribution fund so long as no one is being compelled to contribute. Further more for any public project they are very interested in how it’s going to be paid for and who it will be paid for by. These are admittedly important questions.

I don’t think most reasonable people need to be compelled to support their community, and as I mentioned above scrutiny is necessary. However, I think plutocrats are unreasonable because they were never made to grow beyond the stage most of us do when we learn not everything belongs to us. They should be compelled to first be treated for their maladaptive development and then to join us in society when they understand why they should.

The socialist on the other hand seems to dismiss individual liberties in favor of the community. And in here lies the problem. It’s not about profit. It’s about consent. Look even if you got the most giving community minded individualists together the sticking point would still be consent. Did they choose to give you their money. Even if they support the project and ideals behind it. A conservative and a liberal both believe in supporting families but the conservative wants to keep their money to donate to a local charity whereas the liberal thinks it should be taxed and redistributed into a welfare fund. They both believe in the same thing but have different economic policies about how to achieve them.

There’s a balance. We are individuals and also members of the human race making us social by nature. I think all individual freedoms should be protected to the extent that they don’t cause harm to others. I don’t consider offending personal sensibilities to be a harm, either. It makes sense to reasonable people to be part of a community and I personally believe tolerance is a community sustaining value. In a healthy society, there shouldn’t be a need for compulsion. There are steps to be taken from an unhealthy society to make it healthy and those steps should be carefully considered, but are necessary to prevent degradation. Doing something and doing nothing are both risks.

How would you codify redistribution and public ownership without licensing agreements or by utilizing violence? Really I’m not sure how you get around private ownership without violence. Copyleft licensing is based on copyright and parenting and is based on the notion that he who creates owns, and therefore he that creates can also give it away. But you wouldn’t have patents and copyright without private ownership.

Violence from whom? So much of liberal capitalism is completely constructed and depends entirely on participation of members who have faith in that system. A massive general strike could bring the entire system down very quickly, and I would bet that in this case every liberal government in the world would immediately act to compel the labor which isn’t being offered by any means necessary. Trump sure as hell would. If we stopped doing this and started doing something else, it could be done peacefully but the established order would not peacefully allow that to happen.

And if there is no private ownership, say of land or water or natural resources, then what then? Can anyone utilize anything? Why own anything or pay taxes if you don’t own anything? And we’re back to the gift economy issue again. Contribute vs accrue. So why not start with making it voluntary to begin with?

Anarchists like to say, “Anarchism doesn’t mean no rules, it means no rulers.” If a village is living in freedom, would they respect the freedom of one villager to start burning down houses, even without a leader to tell them whether it’s allowed? Of course not. People generally aren’t that stupid. A community can manage resources and a network of communities could theoretically manage resources on a larger scale. I can’t tell you exactly what the final answer would be, but it doesn’t sound impossible to me for people to govern themselves democratically in the absence of kings or executives.

Also please explain to me if all capitalism is right wing how a communist country like China is a capitalist powerhouse. Is China left wing or right wing from your perspective?

I’m still trying to figure out why anyone would consider China a communist country if they’re arguing in good faith. Their government is an interesting experiment with many socialist oriented accomplishments such as minimum standards of living, full employment, and relative stability contrasting our boom bust cycles. That being said having a non-democratic government run by the upper class, especially when the government of exclusively upper class people determine who becomes upper class, is far from my ideal. Having a government as powerful as theirs does appear to keep Capitalism in check better than we can, though. I’ve heard serious arguments that it’s a decent transitional government to a communist government, but honestly it looks like the establishment over there like it how it is and would rather grow their power and wealth than transition to communism. Rather than an authoritarian government keeping capitalism in check, I would rather a democratic government with universal ownership and investment by the whole people. No despots publicly or privately is what I personally prefer.

This was much longer than I expected. I’ll reply to your next post some time soon.

Now a GIFT economy is completely different. Honoring people for giving stuff away is not only a totally voluntary system but also changes the cultural dynamic from honoring people for having lots of stuff. It changes the focus from accumulation to contribution.

This sounds pretty socialist to me. I’m completely with you when it comes to changing structures in our society to incentive pro-social behavior rather than the selfish behavior as our system does. I don’t think anyone appreciates that being a ruthless competitor to the detriment of ones neighbors is often rewarded in our systems. If such ruthless people pursued their selfish desires in a system which accommodates their nature and rewards them for having a pro-social effect, I think they would be extremely beneficial rather than a danger as they are now.

Both left and right can get behind open source software. Both can support the concept of gifting. Where I see the conflict is when it comes to using compulsion. No the common good does not outweigh individual liberty because what you do to the individual you do to the whole. Sacrificing individual liberty for the greater good is a myth. You can’t have taxation without sacrificing privacy and security of the collective. If you sacrifice freedom of speech for the sake of avoiding public offense then you sacrifice public discourse and the values of democracy. If rewrite history to exclude unpleasant truths then you risk repeating it.

I think most people agree that it’s a good thing to have a community of some kind. In that community it’s a good thing to help one another, or more specifically to trade favors. As a community can provide many services and infrastructure to all members of that community which no individual could provide for themselves on their own, I don’t think it’s out of the question that all able-bodied members of that community contribute to it. The people who receive from the community but don’t contribute to it when they could in my opinion are parasites. I’m not talking about the elderly and disabled who would if they could and deserve their dignity, of course, because that’s all our destiny. If someone takes from their community without giving back to it, I would have a problem with them and probably insist that they get off their ass or leave probably with other people who care about them and would rather they straighten up. I don’t think that kind of compulsion is unfair. When someone is sick or compromised, it is in the community’s interest to help that person back to health and provide them what they need to get better and there’s no need to compel that. This is essentially how humans have always lived until recently in some parts of the world.

No, I don’t think such lazy jerks should be imprisoned and forced to labor. Social pressure is enough. I respect their right to complain about having to work at all because if a society runs cooperatively, when we fix those problems we have less work to do and more time to live life with family and loved ones.

As above, so below, as within, so without. It applies to society, politics and economics as well.

I think my metaphor holds in these aspects as well.

I have no problem with distributing funds that are given freely. I have a problem with all property that is taken using violence. How is taxation different than colonialism? You have big guns, you see something you want and you abscond with it. How is that different than what any empire does? The fact you redistribute it is irrelevant if it’s done involuntarily.

In a lot of cases, taxation is colonialism. I do not appreciate my tax dollars being spent on international murders, and I don’t imagine most people would appreciate it either if they understood the extent of it. In any government using resources for oppression is intolerable. That being the case, not all tax dollars are used for the purposes of oppression. Taxes fund a multitude of necessary resources, services, and infrastructure in a way a profit-driven organization could not. One may not personally care about babies starving to death being prevented by a government program, but in situations that babies starve to death very negative consequences could arise that come around to affect them and others. In cases like these, I think it’s appropriate to extract taxes from stupid, ignorant, or outright psychopathic people for the social good even if they are individually unable to understand it’s not ok to allow babies to starve to death in a healthy society anywhere at any time. There is of course the matter of the effectiveness and cost of these programs which should of course be open to scrutiny and improvement on a democratic basis. (cont2)

Thanks for agreeing to a good faith conversation. If you’ve ever heard of “leftist infighting,” understand that the closest political label I can place on myself is “leftist infighter.” The second closest would be “Anarchist” which I can’t claim because I disagree that it can be suddenly achieved and believe it must be worked toward over an indefinite period of time. I do not represent anyone other than myself. I would not call myself a Marxist. I think his explanations of the problems with Capitalism are excellent, but I don’t consider him to be a demigod to be quoted similarly to scripture especially when it comes to his prescriptions which I find myself often disagreeing with.

The main thing to understand about Socialism is that it’s an ideal rather than a practical reality we already have a plan for. Socialism broadly is the desire for a system which allows every individual exactly as much autonomy, government influence, and ownership of their own labor as every other individual in that given society. This idea has existed long before Marx and is found throughout the world and even among historical Christians. However long this desire has existed, we have not yet figured out how to do this yet in a sustainable way. The societies that come closest haven’t been able defend themselves from piracy-based cultures which have raped and pillaged their way through the entire world since armies were made possible (today on a scale never before seen), and the socialist states based on defending themselves from that suffer from their military having too much influence on their societies causing undue authoritarianism (China is doing a weird other thing which I’ll touch on later). This being the case all governments since the advent of agriculture have been similarly experimental and almost all of them have failed or are failing in a kind of cycle depending on the proportion of credulous bootlickers around.

Since we haven’t generally figured out totally stable systems for humans yet, I support moving in a Socialist direction according to the ideal I described above. I won’t pretend to know the best way to do that because the world is far more complex than any of us could possibly conceive, so in my opinion the only thing we can do is experiment and learn from the results of our experiments. The experiment of Capitalism has yielded enough results for me to doubt it could last even if left undisturbed as the accumulation of wealth in few hands inherent to Capitalism has to be managed in some way while the full force of Capitalism is against managing it and has now overcome the traditionally more powerful nation states which dominated the last century. You may know some leftists and self-described socialists who do not desire total equality of autonomy, government influence, and ownership of their own labor. I can’t speak for them. I will work with them as far as they progress the ideal of socialism and oppose them wherever they do not. Any experiment with a socialist system should not be considered an end state until the ideal is achieved in my opinion.

Now that you have a better idea of where I’m personally coming from, I can answer your questions

Should one’s private property be seized and distributed among the masses?

Some of it certainly should be. I may draw the line differently than others, but broadly I would be totally for immediately abolishing all rent-seekers who produce nothing and leech off of others only by “owning” their means of basic survival such as hedge-fund managed housing for example. “Natural Monopolies” make absolutely zero sense to be private enterprises even according to the logic of Capitalism which benefits the consumer only when there is competition. As far as seizing and redistributing I think there are some examples which would cause minimal disruption and would be ultimately good even for a liberal society. Those are easy ones. More gray area is in massive private institutions have the ownership changed over to the employees. The businesses themselves could run essentially the same as they did before because the owner or owners typically don’t work in businesses on that scale. This would immediately destroy a massive amount of “wealth” which never existed in the first place though which could cause any number of consequences so it would have to be done carefully.

How much water, food, territory, can one accrue before one has to fear the public utilizing violence against them?

How would an individual accrue these things? If this individual accrued these necessities of life, thus prohibiting others from accessing those necessities of life, wouldn’t violence be the inevitable consequence of that from starving people who have lost all rationality from hunger? As far as territory, how would an individual accrue territory and by what means would that individual maintain their claim? How would it benefit them to maintain it so, unless they plan on creating a family cult system?

Arguably the poorest person on welfare in a first world country is a king compared to someone living in a third world country. If you have access to a grocery store, electricity, running water and some kind of medical care regardless of how shitty or expensive it might be then you’re better off than thousands of people the world over. Then factor in things like health standards. Do you have to boil your water to make sure it’s clean to drink? Do you have to put up with insect or rat infestations? Do you have a working stove and fridge? And the. What if THOSE huddled masses wanted to take your riches away and redistribute then?

This is touching on an extremely important dynamic. Why do Westerners live in such privilege while the people living in their colonies do not? The answer here is not to redistribute, it’s to end the exploitation. I think Westerners are competent enough to sustain themselves and their cultures without the need to bleed people from across the world. I believe it’s possible that minimum standards of health greater than what even I have access to now (racketeers are between me and healthcare in my country) are achievable in every part of the world in a fairer system.

Look I’m not saying that having more money than one can spend is healthy personally or culturally. Honestly if I had a couple thousand dollars I’d be set. A million and I probably wouldn’t know what to do with it all. But that’s not the issue as I see it. Where is the cut off point if we sanction forced redistribution?

We agree here. As far as where the cut off point should be, I think that could have a definite answer depending on the individual circumstances of any given place. (cont)

Since it took a while for you to respond to me long after anyone would be looking, it seems like you’re interested in a legitimate conversation with me concerning my leftist values. It looks like you’ve been thinking about this a lot. I’m willing to engage with you in good faith and explain my personal thinking.

One thing that is very important to have a productive conversation is to agree on the definition of terms. I wasn’t being dismissive when I was offering sources from the Encyclopedia Britannica. One thing that makes many conversations completely impossible is different understandings of the same words, causing the parties involved to be arguing completely different points often without realizing. The reason I bring this up is specifically in regards to “Private Property,” which is a bit more nuanced than encompassing all individual items “owned” by any given individual. There are no serious leftists advocating for confiscating handtools, computers, furniture, or other such pieces of individual property from the entire population and redistributing them equally. Although the definition can be construed this way, no one is arguing for that. For a better understanding of what is meant my “Private Proptery” in a more common politcal context, below is quoted Marx’s view in Capital:

Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labour and the external conditions of labour belong to private individuals. But according as these private individuals are labourers or not labourers, private property has a different character. The numberless shades, that it at first sight presents, correspond to the intermediate stages lying between these two extremes. The private property of the labourer in his means of production is the foundation of petty industry, whether agricultural, manufacturing, or both; petty industry, again, is an essential condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the labourer himself. Of course, this petty mode of production exists also under slavery, serfdom, and other states of dependence. But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it attains its adequate classical form, only where the labourer is the private owner of his own means of labour set in action by himself: the peasant of the land which he cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso…

From that moment new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social organisation fetters them and keeps them down. It must be annihilated; it is annihilated. Its annihilation, the transformation of the individualised and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, of the pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence, and from the means of labour, this fearful and painful expropriation of the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital…

Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent labouring individual with the conditions of his labour, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labour of others, i.e., on wage labour…

The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production. (Chapter 32)

Edit: If you’re willing to engage in good faith and clarify what we mean by the words we use, I would be more than happy to address your points and answer your questions.

DO NOT DELETE THIS. The more people know about Citizen’s United the better. Naming this decision as a lynchpin of our society’s current troubles is something everyone needs to understand. Although our system has been rotted from the inside out due to this decision, preventing any established procedure from possibly removing it, people still need to understand that we can’t have a government that runs on quid pro quo. Even if this can’t be the way to solve the problem, more awareness means that more people may try more original approaches which could possibly work.

Odd phrasing in the title. Of course they can. They can do anything. They understand that the real question is what anyone is going to do about it when they break the law.

My hopes for Falcon and the Wnter Soldier were dashed during the last episode of that series where, instead of addressing anything the series had been building up to at that point, Captain bootlicker kowtows to the evil Senators that caused the problem in the first place and asks them to please do better.

Many of those societies exist today and are thriving compared to our lifestyles. The San people in the Namibian desert have a much higher quality of life in terms of physical, mental, and social health than almost any of us English speakers.

Biden learned the hard way that you can’t commit a genocide and still be liked unless you talk like a cult leader and collect millions of loyal dupes.

Microsoft likely considers this to be a feature rather than a bug. Another avenue for brainwashing credulous people is wide open.

Ironic

Indiscriminate is the correct word. They were detonated all at the same time regardless of where their targets location at the time. Civilians were killed, including children.

The indiscriminate detonations killed many civilians including children.

In my interpretation, the Democrats chose supporting genocide and therefore maintaining the funding for all elections in the future in our quid pro quo system rather than to end the genocide and win the presidency but have most of the plutocracy yank their funding for future elections. Ultimately, it was the result of a long term strategy by our Capitalist class to capture the government for financial purposes which culminated in 2010 with the Citizen’s United decision. Since then, the behavior of our elected leaders correlates directly with funder interests and not at all with polling data from constituents.

That Democracy can be an effective check on Capitalism. Liberalism is my favorite fairy tale. If all the propaganda I was fed as a kid in the 90s was actually true, I’d be in paradise.

Sure, I’ll agree with that. Liberalism, despite being fundamentally right wing, is definitely not the furthest right economic system or social philosophy. The only thing about it is that many of those countries existing in that state (or were made into countries at all) exist in the context of global white supremacist capitalist hegemony (AKA “The West” or “The Global North”) and would not exist in their current forms without the West installing figureheads and funding conflicts to loot their natural resources, so I would argue that many of these neo-colonies are still capitalist without any of the benefits of hosting the capitalists.

For example, whatever government existed in India under the British Mandate, they existed in a Capitalist system which exclusively benefitted the British. Millions died of famine not because of India, but because of Britain.