Medicare only exists to cover the most expensive patients who require the most care, so that we can support a massive private insurance industry, and to ensure that industry remains profitable.
Anyone who denies that this system exists to explicitly elevate one class of people over another whom are exploited is living in a fantasy world
Its been a long time, like I said I read it right when it came out. I'm glad people enjoyed it! It was quite an investment, and I loved most of the books leading up, even the Wizard and the Glass. You all make some good points but it just didn't hit me that way and I'm not liable to go back. I hardly read any fiction anymore, except the occasional classic, Philip K Dick, or whenever Joe Abercrombie comes out with a new book I'll usually pick it up.
Well there's this, its old but pretty funny https://fxtwitter.com/ParrotVulcan/status/1813712659268722955?s=19
Also.
I don't know how much more digging around I wanna do in my discord server for random examples. And considering I wanted to delete this post -- still not sure why people can still.see my.posts after I delete them. Must be a bug with different instances
"If I can't have it, noone can!"
But you can hav---
"I SAID NOONE CAN HAVE IT!!!"
Honestly I feel like I see this smile a lot when you look at politicians, ceos of big or terrible companies. Its like they don't know how to smile, at best they do the thing with the mouth but the eyes just look cold and predatory. Ron Desantis looks like he's being involuntarily sodomized when he smiles in pictures, its like he can't even fake it.
Not that I think these people can't feel joy or genuinely smile, I'm sure you could get more expression from them if you paid them to physically torture helpless poor people. But when they smile for us, its always dead in the eyes
Generations of socialists have been critical of social democracy. Generations of capitalists have been saying that social democracy is the closest we will ever get to socialism. So who should I believe, the western consensus of capitalist academia, beholden to big money donors for research grants, or the most brilliant, brave and capable intellectuals of the past 200 years, such as Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, DuBois, Lenin and (for a bit of Nordic flair) Pannekoek?
Because what is the Nordic model really? A huge part of the Nordic economy is defense contractors, which means your social democracy is paid for with mass death, imperialism and immiseration. Also, as a member of the western hegemon, Nordic countries enjoy the fruits of neocolonial exploitation of Africa, Asia, South America, etc., not very socialistic to prop up a class of war mongering rich, even if they pay marginally higher taxes than elsewhere.
This debate has existed for a long time, but to socialists it is settled. The Wikipedia entry for the Gotha program of 1875 calls it "explicitly socialist." And even by today's standards, it was and would be fairly progressive; calling for workers rights, universal sufferage, etc., but to many of the members of the first socialist international it was controversial because it relied on an upper class of politicians and business men to administer the social reforms. Karl Marx wrote his "Critique of the Gotha Program" tearing apart every point of the short document as another form of class rule, and even created some problems for his socially a connected partner Friedrich Engels by calling Ferdinand Lasalle, a popular reformer, politician and architect of the Gotha program, "a petty dictator in waiting." He could not have known that Lasalle was in fact conspiring with von Bismarck to enact a plan of social democracy that would serve as a cover for a new regime of class domination that would undercut the socialist movement with moderate reforms, while making the working class beholden to the political/economic upper class.
These reforms can be taken away over time, which we are seeing in European social democracies over the last 40 years; leaving only the naked coercive competitive drive of capitalism to govern all social relations.
And like, I'm an American, my country is the imperial epicenter for neocolonialism imperialist expansion, bourgeois decadence, exploitation and immiseration (for now.) My experiences with people from Nordic countries who I have met have been overwhelmingly positive. Your social democracies are superior to our laissez faire capitalism, they make more sense, are more stable and less subject to natural instability cycles inherent to the system. Nothing is cut-and-dry, there are blended forms of political and economic organization, just like there are blended classes, and new forms are always emerging as history marches. If you want to believe that your social democracies are an island within capitalism, that's mostly true! But to a socialist, it is not socialism. Quoting a Wikipedia article at us when most of us are acutely aware of how it is used by businesses and governments to shape our remembrance of history and the ideas with which we use to shape the world, comes off as incredibly weak and unconvincing, especially when so many of us spend years studying independently, having discussions and organizing our communities. You can quote wikipedia but it will never convince a socialist. I hope you become more mindful of where you are getting your information and whom that particular interpretation of facts serves. Spoiler alert! Its the owners of private property, the means of production, which have always shaped history and defined the classes and antagonisms inherent to them.
I hated book 7, ruined the whole series
I hated book 7. Ruined the whole series for me. I read the last 3 books (excluding Wind through the Keyhole, I'm done) when they came out, book 6 was just a setup/tease for book 7 and I was so excited for it. But it was so dumb and disappointing. I've talked to people who liked the ending and I just don't get it. 6 books building up the existential evil that lived at the center of all existence, and when he gets to the tower to face the evil it's just an old guy on a balcony throwing Harry Potter hand grenades. You have to suspend so much disbelief to get there, trudge through thousands of pages, and it's just a sad, pathetic, uninspired, lazy ending.
I have a constitutional right to glue an Uzi to a quadcopter to protect my GMC Sierra
Roko's basilisk is gonna have a field day with this one
I mean, I guess that's fine. People are more rude to me more than I am to them; I just can't always shake the feeling that a post is dumb and pointless