[Thanos]

Then again, the other side's alternatives weren't much of an improvement either....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_ ... ging_Order

$1:

"Comrades! The insurrection of five kulak districts should be pitilessly suppressed. The interests of the whole revolution require this because 'the last decisive battle' with the kulaks is now underway everywhere. An example must be made.

Hang (absolutely hang, in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, fatcats, bloodsuckers.
Publish their names.
Seize all grain from them.
Designate hostages - in accordance with yesterday's telegram.
Do it in such a fashion, that for hundreds of verst around the people see, tremble, know, shout: "the bloodsucking kulaks are being strangled and will be strangled".

Telegraph receipt and implementation. Yours, Lenin.

P.S. Find tougher people."

A kulak is really nothing more than a peasant who owned eight or more acres.

And this is what you most likely get when those with the nifty ideas about nationalization of resources and other such tripe end up in power.

[Scape]

[JaredMilne]

Thanos Thanos:

Then again, the other side's alternatives weren't much of an improvement either....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_ ... ging_Order

$1:

"Comrades! The insurrection of five kulak districts should be pitilessly suppressed. The interests of the whole revolution require this because 'the last decisive battle' with the kulaks is now underway everywhere. An example must be made.

Hang (absolutely hang, in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, fatcats, bloodsuckers.
Publish their names.
Seize all grain from them.
Designate hostages - in accordance with yesterday's telegram.
Do it in such a fashion, that for hundreds of verst around the people see, tremble, know, shout: "the bloodsucking kulaks are being strangled and will be strangled".

Telegraph receipt and implementation. Yours, Lenin.

P.S. Find tougher people."

A kulak is really nothing more than a peasant who owned eight or more acres.

And this is what you most likely get when those with the nifty ideas about nationalization of resources and other such tripe end up in power.

The problem is ideology taken too damn far.

We had the best of both worlds when we had both a vigorous private sector and a strong social safety net. The bloodshed Thanos describes comes from taking government and collective action too far, while the massive and increasing inequality we see is the hangover from the last 35 years of the Hayek/Friedman economics that said "put a blind, naive faith in perfect and infallible markets and private sectors that never fuck up and we'll have utopia!"

When even the big capitalist institutions are increasingly worried about income inequality, there's a serious problem.

Maybe we should've listened to the Mel Hurtigs and Joseph Stiglitzes of the world 20+ years ago...

[Thanos]

More democratic socialism wouldn't bother me all that much. In fact I'd probably fully support a lot of the new policies and programs.

Revolutionary socialism though? Confiscation of property and bank accounts? Nationalization of pretty much everything and designating it to be run on party principles instead of actual economic reality? Nah, that's been proven everywhere it's been tried as being the first steps on the way to the dark cellar where the dissident gets a bullet shot into the back of their neck. That so many are now embracing this sort of thing, online and in groups like Antifa or in the cafe talk of disgusting campus tankie faculty members? That's not cute or harmless, it's dangerous. The French Revolution proved what sort of nightmare can erupt when a cadre of chattering class psychopaths take over a nation. Ideas become sheer murder rather rapidly. And, despite the shrugged shoulders and "oh, you" reactions of the dilettantes of the 20th century who didn't take this seriously, or who openly supported it, the revolutionaries of the left have zero daylight between themselves and the likes of the Nazis when it comes to shedding someone else's blood in order to advance the glory of the cause.

This needs to be kept in mind the next time a half-hour video about "the obscenities of capitalism" gets posted. Try not to fall asleep during them because a sentence or two usually gets uttered that exposed what the revolutionary posting it really wants to see happen. I.e. they want a repeat chance to implement that which has totally failed everywhere it's been tried and another mountain of corpses and more rivers of blood really don't seem to bother them at all.

I'm no capitalist, or an apologist for the criminality of the moneyed classes. Their opposite number though? They're just a murder spree waiting to happen. Anyone who can't see it is either truly ignorant of actual historical reality or, far more likely, genuinely in support of the worst that will occur after implementation of the program simply because they're so full of revolutionary zeal and sheer hatred that they've shedded any humane portions of their souls that they might have once possessed.

Letting it happen once was one thing as no one really knew what was going to happen the first few times around. No one in Paris in 1789, for example, would have ever believed that their chattering friends in the salons uttering the great noble statements would be merrily lopping off the heads of tens of thousands (including killing off most of their fellow chatterers and salon attendees) by the time the summer of blood came around in 1794. Letting anything like this happen again, after all the crimes have been revealed and the bones are still being unearthed? That's a complete moral & ethical failure on the part of any generation that would let this sort of thing ever repeat itself.

[xerxes]

That's the problem with revolutions: it's hard to put the brakes on things when you're upending the social order. And there's always sociopaths waiting for their chance to satiate their bloodlust under the guise of revolutionary fervour.

[Scape]

CAPITASOCIAFASCILIBDEMARXISM: Exploring ISMs in the Modern Age

$1:

In today’s cure for insomnia episode, we explore the origins of the ISMs the pundit class abuses each and every day. We’re focusing on the big ones. Fascism, Socialism, Communism, Marxism and Capitalism. The show covers the theorists who created these theories, touch on the circumstances that inspired their thinking and how far from these concepts we have moved as a society. Plus, we’ll talk through how most of these theories (except fascism) are more alike than we’ve been led to believe. (99 and Manny note: “Not the most scintillating episode, but Max was so excited we didn’t have the heart to tell him.”)

^^ Useful primer.

[Thanos]

xerxes xerxes:

That's the problem with revolutions: it's hard to put the brakes on things when you're upending the social order. And there's always sociopaths waiting for their chance to satiate their bloodlust under the guise of revolutionary fervour.

The sociopaths are usually quite well ensconced in the revolutionary intellectual circles from the beginning. If anything it's usually some brutalist psychopath in charge of the revolution from the get-go. Both Lenin and Trotsky, who still get touted as heroes by the tankies & who apparently "would have kept the revolution on the right track" if death & Stalin hadn't claimed them, were both more than willing to put their signatures on orders that resulted in the mass deaths of hundreds of thousands. All Stalin did was bide his time in order to solidify his plans to wipe out the rest of the upper rank of Bolsheviks, all of whom were as equally murderous as he was and who absolutely would have done the exact same things that he did if they'd maintained control of the party.

They were all killers to their cores. Communism, and all of revolutionary socialism, were destined to do what they did because it was what they most desperately wanted to do. Like, who in the hell is still stupid enough to read Marx's eliminationist rhetoric about "liquidating the bourgeousie" and not know right from those words on those pages that not just an upsetting of the economic & social order was going to happen but that a massive purge & massacre of other human beings was all but inevitable when Marxism won? As with Mein Kampf so too with The Communist Manifesto - they openly told everyone exactly what they were going to do, not just to economic theory and practice but to millions of other human beings. There was to be mercy towards none, and every single person in the leadership circles did what they could to annihilate any dissent before they themselves got eliminated by the purges and show trials. Murder was built into the very bones of the program and anyone who says otherwise is either a fool, an apologist, or an outright liar.

The Bolsheviks wiped out the pantomime parliament that came into being after the Kerensky government after less than a month of it existing. Fuck, even the Jacobins in 1790's France allowed the hollow powerless joke of the National Assembly to keep yammering away uselessly for the duration of the Revolution. That's all anyone needs to know about how revolutionary socialists regard any sort of obstacles to the designs & desires.

[Scape]

[Scape]

[Scape]

Telecom Company Sued by 48 States Over Robocalls

[DrCaleb]

Industry knew about risks of PFAS 'forever chemicals' for decades before push to restrict them, study says

$1:

Makers of PFAS, a class of chemicals used in everything from cookware to food containers and makeup, had evidence the substances were toxic as early as the 1970s and obscured the danger, according to a new study based on industry archives held at the University of California.

Governments in Canada and the U.S. are now cracking down on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a class of more than 9,000 human-made chemicals produced since the 1940s. They have unique properties that make them heat-resistant, oil- and water-repellent and friction-resistant, and are found in products from cosmetics and take-out boxes to non-stick cookware and fire suppressants.

[Scape]

[Scape]

[DrCaleb]

Edmonton memorial honours 156 deaths from homelessness in 2022

[DrCaleb]