this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2024
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Uh no thanks. It's hard to be sympathetic towards any official side of that war because they're all major assholes. Why do they only have socialists and islamists in those areas? Why hasn't liberalism and freedom taken root in the Near East?
Can't imagine why the Middle East doesn't trust liberals, it's a real goddamn mystery.
Injects oil directly into his veins
Liberalism and its "freedom" hasn't taken root because:
Liberals fucked the whole region in the first place.
Shareholder profits are not going to inspire the masses to take up arms and fight.
Liberalism cannot provide a better future for anyone, so the people turn towards the groups who try to provide a change.
Extremely funny you say this in this situation since there is a group here fighting for freedom and democracy but they're stinky reds, so you'll hate them.
The other things you said can be accepted as opinions, but here I'll have to correct you: In this conflict, Bashar al-Assad is the socialist (Ba'athist), and the group "fighting for freedom and democracy", as you put it, is Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham. They are a far-right islamist religious fundamentalist terrorist organization.
So essentially nobody in Syria is fighting for any sensible definition of democracy or freedom.
I was talking about AANES, not the "socialist" Assad or the clearly religious authoritarian groups in the area.
I liked the image I saw a few days back. Conservatives will play to your base needs (food/water, shelter, family), while Liberals/Socialists expect selflessness and assume all your needs are already met, including self-fulfilment.
Especially in the poorer and war torn regions of the world, the former is magnitudes more appealing. If non-extremist groups want to have a chance, they need to cover the bases first.
That's a good elevator speech, can I borrow it? Christmas dinner with my mom's side of the family is coming up quick.
Of course, lemme look for the original.
E: can't find it anymore. It speaks about the top and bottom three layers of Maslow's pyramid and how liberals expect transcendence and selflessness, while conservatives falsely promise the bottom three layers and act like the rest don't matter.
Ask iran and iraq what happend to their Democratically elected leaders. Oh yeah, the west are massive gaslighters and couped many Democraticlly elected leader over fears of "communism" aka new age colonialism style resource extraction. The militants aren't the cause their the symptom.
Yeah, Iran's last democratically elected leader was Mohammed Mosaddegh, who upheld the most watered down and benign version of social democracy you can think of. He publicly opposed communism and really should've been an ally or at least a friend of the west.
CIA was out of their fucking minds when they fucked that one up.
There's absolutely no reason iran isn't our friend and Saudi Arabia (where literal wahabism is from which is a plague to the west but a bigger plague to the Muslims around the world with rich degenerate sheiks come over to tell us "authentic islam") buttt mosaddegh nationalised oil, and to west, it never mattered about morals, human rights. It was about who could extract the most native resources and give to some white asshole nepo baby
the fuck is wrong with socialism here?
I can't speak for others, but I've seen nothing but death and hate under the banner of socialism: USSR, China, Venezuela, etc, the list goes on. What most non-crazy people seem to mean by "socialism" is liberalism with a strong social safety net and public services (e.g. Nordic countries, "Democratic socialists" like Bernie Sanders, etc), which is a separate thing altogether.
Exactly, and specifically for this thread this is not quite the same socialism what Bashar al-Assad has been going for.
Here's the issue. Capitalist nations are afraid of socialism spreading, so they do everything they can to destroy them. The only ones who have every survived this pressure are authoritarian dictatorships who have isolated themselves from western influence. This creates a situation (that the media, being capitalist, spreads) where socialism always ends up as authoritarian. That doesn't have to be the case, but it does when anything else is destroyed. It's ignorant to think that this is the fault of socialism and not circumstances.
Whether socialism results in authoritarianism because of the ideology or circumstances is irrelevant, the fact is that socialism generally ends in authoritarianism. It turns out that it takes a lot of force to transition a country from capitalism to socialism, so it's not surprising that this transition attracts authoritarians.
And yeah, it probably doesn't have anything to do with socialism itself, but on that transition. We see the same for other radical transitions. The problem isn't necessarily what you're transitioning to, but the process of transition and who is involved. Most countries in the world aren't socialist, so transitioning to socialism will be a radical change and will attract the worst kinds of leaders. So it's fair to criticize socialism precisely because a radical transition to it is highly likely to be fraught with authoritarianism.
Even transitions to liberalism runs that risk, but transitioning to liberalism has had a much better track record than transitioning to socialism.
That said, country-wide forms of socialism (arguably "pure" socialism) where capitalism is eradicated naturally come with a distillation of power in the government to control the flow of goods, and that concentration of power is what attracts authoritarians and is what's being opposed here. So socialism has a built-in problem that lends itself to authoritarianism. Yes, I know there are theoretical anarchist forms of socialism, but they usually have a transition period from an authoritarian system (big counter is libertarian socialism, but that's pretty "pie in the sky" IMO, as much as I respect Noam Chomsky).
The reason is because capitalists oppose it. If the world was ruled by Fascists you'd be saying we should try anything else because anyone opposed to Fascists gets undermined. It's a fault of capitalism, not socialism.
There have been many elected socialist democracies, but the West undermined them. We can have socialist countries without any issues. It just requires capitalists in the rest of the world not overthrowing them.
We're getting into very biased reporting territory.
Let's take Venezuela as an example. Here's the events as I understand them:
Western sanctions only became a thing years (more like a decade) after they were already in crisis. The crisis wasn't caused by western countries, it was caused by mismanagement and corruption. Venezuela was held as a model for socialism under Chavez, but things only worked because of oil money.
I'm happy to discuss other countries as well.
America.
Radical liberal George Washington and his gang of discovery daddies overthrow the just and fair and healthy rule of the king
Now you know none of that is true, but that's how you sound defending capitalism. All the death and destruction capitalism caused but they try to sell you on socialism being much worse. Which it is not, Capitalism has absolutely caused far more harm.
Then you're obviously ignoring the death and destruction socialism has caused. Socialism has only been a thing for 100 years or so, and yet it has caused nearly 100M deaths (source: a libertarian publication referencing an infographic based on WHO data):
Lmfao
Capitalism has killed no one then?
The Atlantic slave trade, the human trafficking of today, the resource wars, the embargo and economic punishment of those who don't submit to capitalism, the imperialistic wars, violence from police states to uphold capitalism, drug overdoses, those dying of homelessness/lack of healthcare/food.
Plus if we track the metric used that anyone who died under socialism died from socialism as you do, then let's see 3 million people die a year in America multiply that by 100.
300,000,000 million deaths from capitalism in ONE single capitalist country over the last 100 years. (America). That's not factoring in the other nations or the actions they've caused outside of their country that also applies to this total.
60 million people die globally a year. We live in a capitalist global economy so it's safe to claim most of that total but let's play it safe. Only 40 million die under capitalism a year. Multiply that by 100 and
4 BILLION PEOPLE HAVE DIED FROM CAPITALISM OVER THE LAST 100 YEARS
Wow sounds like socialism is the better option.
About 2M.
Socialist countries are near the top of the charts here, like N. Korea and Cambodia. The problem isn't due to any economic system, but the failure of law enforcement.
Not sure what you mean by this, specifically, and I'd prefer to not wade too far into vagaries.
If you look at the actual reasons here, it's usually due to human rights violations, authoritarianism, or something along those lines (affiliation w/ the USSR, the US's main enemy, used to be sufficient). Russia has recently received massive economic punishment and they are absolutely capitalist, and they got those sanctions due to the aforementioned reasons.
You'll need to be a bit more specific to arrive at a number, but generally speaking, the death toll wasn't that high, and all combined is likely way less than the Great Chinese Famine, which was entirely man-made.
What's interesting is that most of those deaths are from fentanyl, and China is the main manufacturer of the ingredients to make fentanyl. So production starts in China, gets distributed abroad, and then ends up in the US, probably because it's relatively easy to get drugs into the US due to the cartels' established networks.
This isn't a failure of capitalism, unless you're blaming Americans for having enough money to buy drugs. Fentanyl production in the US is practically non-existent, so it's not like it's a failure of policy either.
Here's the source I used for this.
China and the US have about the same homelessness rate, and the US has a lower rate than many other developed countries, like France and Germany (and quite notably New Zealand). That said, reporting varies by country, so these figures probably can't be fully trusted.
These are generally more symptoms of the state of the economy and has little to do with the actual economic system in place, and most of the top countries here are quite poor generally and most of the countries with the least homelessness are generally wealthy, and their are outliers everywhere.
But I don't, those figures are deaths directly attributable to socialism, such as famines caused by poor central planning. Deaths due to natural causes and things not directly related to the regime in charge aren't included.
Insanity.
My dude absolutely no. The entire premise was to point out this "100m died due to socialism" is a joke and people repeating it come off as completely foolish. The entire idea of attributing an economic system to death is ridiculous. Flipping that back onto any system you'll only see insane death tolls that are goofily interpreted to press a point not tell the truth.
Second this over run point of socialism = famine and capitalism doesn't is fuckin SILLY.
9 Million people a year from malnourishment now
Over a century that's 900 million people. Ridiculous numbers goofy.
The point is people want to fucking feed people. We both you and I wanna help people. Under this system now that rules globally we aren't doing it at least I and others like me do not. The points you're making is capitalist crap propaganda, unhelpful goalless and mostly soulless. Cherry picking death tolls by countries is an asinine way to judge government structure. How many died from the Military-Industrial complex or resource/land wars?
Socialists in western democracies are looking to create food banks, free housing, and accessible healthcare. Help those literally dying from this. Why do you argue so hard against those people lol
They're not, they're attributing a political system to death, because that political system enabled and perhaps rewarded those in power to do it.
Here's a Wikipedia article about it, which has plenty of sources and some criticism. There's no consensus on exact figures (which range from 10-20M all the way to 148M), but there does seem to be consensus that the number is high (definitely millions).
If you have a scholarly alternative to those mentioned in the article, I'd be interested in reviewing it, especially if it makes a strong case for Stalin and Mao not being responsible for tens of millions of deaths by starvation. But just know, once someone puts themselves in charge of coordination of production and distribution of food, I will hold them accountable when that goes wrong.
The capitalist system works around these issues by encouraging and rewarding over supply, since a famine in one area is an arbitrage opportunity in another. Communism, on the other hand, punishes over supply since that means workers aren't efficiently allocated. It also rewards hoarding because that means you're getting more than your fair share and is the closest thing to "profit" (and you can barter excess for other goods you want).
And in most cases, the cause of that is corruption and authoritarianism. Western countries try to send aid to help solve hunger and malnourishment, but dictators take that aid so it doesn't reach the people, because hungry people don't have time to rise up.
Most of the countries with the worst malnutrition are in Africa, and largely in areas known for poor rule of law and high corruption. That said, aside from the early 2020s so far, hunger has been on a consistent downward trend. I couldn't find the source I saw earlier, but this one shows a general downward trend since 2000, and the other report I saw before showed a downward trend since 1900.
There isn't a system that rules globally. Malnutrition tends to be much less in areas with freer markets and less repressive governments. The real enemy here is autocracy, the economic system isn't the interesting factor when it comes to things like access to basic necessities.
I'm only arguing against authoritarianism, and that is what pure socialism tends to devolve into. I have no problem with food banks and other charitable endeavors, in fact I actively support that type of thing. But I draw the line at "just trust me bro" when it comes to putting control of an entire economic system into the hands of a political party. I just don't trust human nature that much.
How about Guatemala.
Democratically elected leftist president who enacted a minimum wage and was going to redistribute land owned by The United Fruit Company to the people, since they owned most of the nation's land.
Couped with the support of the CIA and replaced by a dictator who went on to lead a genocide of the native people.
For more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America
Arévalo wasn't socialist, he was actually anti-communist and generally pro-capitalist. He had way more overlap with FDR than Stalin or Castro.
That wasn't "capitalists keeping the socialists down," it was cronyism and FUD from United Fruit Company, which Eisenhower bought into.
To such a simple question I can offer a simple answer: Everything.
The real answer is not that simple of course. There's some good ideas in socialism.
I don't think people are expressing sympathy.