The right understand 'communism' as authoritarian statism and loss of individual liberty but there is something else going on too.
It's amazing how little right-wingers talk about economics these days. Libertarians are different but Conservatives I know are almost entirely based in the culture war, with all the conspiracy theories and 'anti-wokeness' as a reason d'etra.
With these conspiracies comes a weird bastard hybrid of both McArthysim and proto-Marxism. What I mean by proto-Marxism is that many of them are heavily invested in an anti-establishment narrative. They (crucially) leave out the economic component of class analysis but they do have hatred of government, the elite and 'globalists'. They know that bad people upstairs are fucking them and - in the first instance - this is actually true. Ironically, such determined class hatred is also coupled with McCathyite fear of all things called Communist.
So if you see the ruling class as the problem and hate 'communism' but don't fully understand what either of these things are; it's natural to see them as the same.
@Northwest Hmm... I'm coming at this from an international perspective too and it's not just about Trump. Con artists need at least something to sell and they have to be able to prey on the perceived needs of a target market.
I've always been fascinated by the political right and interested in how and why it has changed since the Reagan/Thatcher years. It can't just be a decline in brain cells.
They do have an ideology. It might be inconsistent and contradictory, but it is there.
These cretins don't know what "communism" is. To them, anyone to the left of Jefferson Davis is a "communist." What's hilarious is that they worship the military and law enforcement, both of which are taxpayer-funded and therefore socialist organizations. And they're the first ones to scream when a private company makes a decision to enforce their own rules on customers.
What they want is a dictatorship, as long as the dictator is someone they like.
@LeopoldBloom well I mean that depends on the definition of socialism. If we mean state rum institutions financed by taxes, then yeah it's socialist. If we mean the actual definition of socialism which is worker's ownership of the means of production, then no, it's not.
@basilfawlty89 I should say "socialized." A socialized service is funded by taxpayers and provides services to everyone free of charge. "Socialized medicine" would be taxpayer-funded, and would provide free medical care. Someone who is unilaterally against socialism would have to oppose [i]all[/i] socialized services. I've talked to libertarians who are opposed to a taxpayer-funded military. Instead, people would choose to buy "invasion insurance" that would pay out if the country was invaded and they had to flee. I'm not sure who would enforce making the insurance company pay out.
@LordShadowfire ive never asked u to explain anything since I understood what the pictures represent, some guys picking on the U.S. because another dimwit posted pics of some poor areas of the U.S. making it seem like its Cuba, does that make the US worse than Cuba or any other places where socialism failed? i think not . does it seem like the guy who posted it has a preference for socialism, i think yes. Hence my question
@LordShadowfire Don't really care man. You're the one all pissed off, all I did was read this post, then I saw that [@basilfawlty] wrote a post replying to @dale74 [quote]You don't get to do that. You made the claim, the burden of truth is upon you. If you back out, it just means you neither have proof nor evidence.[/quote]
And the feeling I got from reading the previous comments is that they made a post making a claim, but didn't link anything. Then, a smartass comment was made to that other person that they couldn't be bothered to look up any kind of proof, because it was the original posters responsibility to do that. So I took it upon myself to link the information the other person was talking about.
I agree that they should have initially linked the information in their post, HOWEVER, if you can't be bothered to actually go and find the information they are telling you about, you have no room whatsoever to complain that they didn't link anything.
This honestly feels like kindergarten, so I'm done with this shit. I have way more important things to do, than argue with a random stranger online. Thanks for the laughs tho lol.
Haha someone actually said that Beyond chicken is communism lol. That's partly because of the anti vegan movement which ironically has its roots in the right wing sphere of things. A lot of anti vegan youtubers subscribe to people like Ben Shapiro and what not so I'm not surprised at this. There's all these conspiracy theories regarding vegans now like agenda 21 (not the exact name) but there's this documentary made by anti vegans saying how there's this communist Marxist plot by vegans to take over the world because we want people to die or something.
To be honest, it's kind of sad. It's basically subverting the narrative and distorting it so that they can maintain the status quo.
I for one, love Beyond meat, their vegan sausages are fvcking great and I don't mean just "great," like "fvcking great," (there's a difference clearly.)
@SatanBurger I would be on board with the veggie meat movement if they could do it without increasing the carbohydrate content. I eat meat because it has basically no carbs.
Big pharma selling vaccines? Government trying to enforce vaccines.
I suppose the great thing about capitalism in a capitalists mind is the power is in the hands of the consumer because if consumers don't buy their products they have to change the way they do things. Exercising the right to complain is a very democratic attribute because we all know what happens when you complain under communist leadership China being a prime example.
While corporations making their own rules is symbolic of a capitalist society censorship is very much a trait of communism and dictatorship.
Capitalism is inherently flawed but so is communism and arguably all systems of governance.
@JimBeam The KFC thing is to illustrate how silly people get, leave it aside and look at the point behind it that people think culture war shit is about economic systems.
Social media censorship is a big one. They're private companies and in a free market they can implement the terms of service they want. It is not socialism to censor speech on Facebook. That's capitalism.
Or some dude was trying to tell me Big Pharma is socialist and how the fuck can giant billion dollar corporations be socialist. You think they're advocating for more unions and higher taxes?
OK, so I guess you're upset that people are mislabeling things. But that happens on both sides.
But it's obvious that Twitter and Facebook are on the side of the Democrats, and that's not a good thing. They should be fair and balanced. Having said that, they have the right to not be fair and balanced. And the government has the right to break them up, because they've become too powerful.
If Twitter wanted to, they could just ban all Republican politicians on their platform.
@JimBeam I get that. Like - if you do not think this way then this post is not about you. I am not speaking about every single conservative on the planet, rather a subset.
People absolutely think that cultural Marxism is a thing, the notion that if you can subvert the norms of society you can then introduce communism uh, somehow.
Part of this is just thinking that communism losing rights when you can lose rights in any system.
