I’ve already been banned from an entire server simply because my username apparently contains a secret message of bigotry and hatred, so I hope you’ll excuse if I’m gonna try to keep it civil and friendly and try not to rustle too many jimmies during my time here.

That’s okay, I can live with that.

I do, but if I said it outright I would just be accused of a lack of empathy and intelligence, plus a whole lot of other things far worse than that, so I won’t.

So if you didn’t get my broad hint, I’m not going to be upset, and if you do, like I said, perhaps take my advice to stew and simmer over it before posting a response in affect.

Ah yes, if only one of those country club going billionaires would decide to use their power to try and come help us…

Yeah, I think I’m just gonna let you stew and simmer on that one.

No one with any power, no one from the right families is coming to help their capital livestock.

That’s an interesting sentence right there. What does that even mean, the “right” families? Are you seriously expecting the people who created the problem to now help solve it?

This exploitation machine is exactly what they wanted and spent decades lining pockets to achieve.

No, of course you aren’t. But by God, let’s also not ask for help from the “wrong” families…

I thought the President doesn’t control the price of goods…

Well, if an undercover cops manages to instigate you to do something illegal, the underlying desire to do it must have already been there, otherwise you’d just tell him to fuck off. But entrapment is still illegal because if he hadn’t provided you with a chance to do it, you may not have followed through after all.

What you seem to be saying is “entrapment is fine as long as it’s done to people I hate”.

You’re missing the point. He deliberately encouraged people to express antisemitism and now he’s complaining that people are expressing more antisemitism.

“In my country there is problem and that problem is the Jew”

https://youtu.be/Vb3IMTJjzfo

Yeah, you could argue that he was only making a joke or a political statement about latent antisemitism that was already present in society, but if he were the police (and he kinda IS policing antisemitism now), this would be called entrapment.

More recently though, he has spent his time complaining about the rise of antisemitism when he himself has done a fair amount of work contributing to it while in the character of Borat.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/sacha-baron-cohen-tells-tiktok-its-creating-biggest-antisemitic-movement-since-nazis/

Straight from the manifesto, page 12:

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.

Accuse me of picking and choosing the most salient passage, but I would say this doesn’t leave too much room for interpretation about what the word “forcible” means. And no, you don’t get to talk your way out by saying ‘overthrowing the status quo via legislation enforced by police would be considered “by force”, regardless of whether the police use violence.’ Isn’t ACAB a quintessentially leftist term? Or does it not apply when the police work for you instead of against you?

Also, just to give a counterexample to your “evil autocrat” problem: Gandhi managed to get rid of British colonial rule without ever advocating for or using violence. So no, the idea that violent oppression justifies a violent response is flawed. Violence always begets more violence, there is literally no exception. You can’t murder your way to a fair and just society, it always ends in oppression.

The big issue with “trying” communism is that it historically has only really occurred through violent revolution. The political instability in these situations gives a perfect opportunity for the seizing of power by exactly those kinds of people.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that violent revolution is exactly what Marx said was essential in order to bring about the communist utopia he envisioned. That’s precisely why communism has such a bad rep among anyone but edgy teenagers and college students. Are you telling me Marx was wrong about this? If so, please elaborate.

Do you really think when people say “eat the rich” they mean “eat farmers?”

No, I brought that up because that’s what historically happened. And in light of that, continuing to use a phrase like that at least seems to be somewhat poor in taste. But that’s besides the point.

Do you really think if Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Elon Musk all died today that the world would be worse off?

I honestly don’t know, but what makes you think the world would be better off if they were dead? Unless they had pledged all their money to charity (which I believe Gates has actually done), what would their deaths really change for you and I?

Getting rid of them will definitely not “get rid of the knowledge” because the only knowledge they have is how to buy the right financial advisors.

That might be true for people who inherited all of their wealth, but if that’s what you’re trying to say, you picked some piss poor examples, because all three of them weren’t born anywhere near as wealthy as they are now and took some considerable risks in order to get there, and they all created literally tens, if not hundreds of thousands of jobs in the process, most of them rather well paid (though we can certainly argue about Amazon).

Just to be perfectly clear, I’m by no means saying that things are okay the way they are, and that all we have to do is let rich people continue to do whatever they want. All I’m saying is that things aren’t as simple as we want them to be and the easy solution is rarely the correct one.

I’m pretty sure “eat the rich” is not comparable to “kill 5 million Ukrainians.”

Well, that’s the thing, that’s actually almost exactly what happend. The Soviets basically labeled all the (relatively) wealthy farmers as class enemies and started deporting them en masse in order to seize their lands and turn them over to collectivized farming. The problem was that along with those farmers, they also got rid of the knowledge they had about how to work the land effectively, and as a result, the following harvests were increasingly poor, which is what caused the mass starvation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Holodomor#Deliberately_engineered_or_continuation_of_civil_war

The same thing happened during the Great Leap Forward in China.

And I’m also pretty sure ‘rich person’ is neither an ethnicity nor a nationality.

Are you saying that because they went by income instead of by race, it technically wasn’t genocide, just mass murder? I’m not sure that makes it any better. Also, don’t forget that a lot of the poor people died as well, so it didn’t even help those it was supposed to benefit.

Communism does not advocate genocide any more than capitalism does.

So “eat the rich” is just edgy humor or what?

Weird, because somehow, every time that every time communism has been tried, it involved massive genocide, though perhaps one could argue that the majority of it was the result of incompetency, because the majority of the victims starved to death as a result of disastrous agricultural policies.

The Holodomor in the Ukraine killed about 3.5-5 million people. The Great Leap Forward killed somewhere between 15-55 million. The Khmer Rouge killed about a million. And I’m not trying to make excuses for National Socialism here, but you have to admit that even when taking to low estimates, communism’s death toll is far higher than that of the Nazis. OP is correct, they’re all evil ideologies.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_regimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Fields https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

I tend to not buy a game on Steam if I already own it on GOG and vice versa. Why pay for the same thing twice?