Yeah, I have a terminally racist relative and was trying to explain to her why we should look after refugees. I asked her if her neighbor's house burnt down whether she would invite them inside and offer them some shelter and comfort, and she agreed that "of course" she would. Then I asked about if it was someone from the next street over, and she immediately became hesitant about it. Sometimes I think as a species we just never psychologically evolved beyond living in a tiny village and fearing anyone we don't know personally.

Some of us Americans are so hopelessly fucking stupid. Kudos to you; I'd have blown up at them and never spoken to them again at some point.

We've tried less democracy and we're all out of ideas!

People really need to read Marx man…

He literally described fascism decades before it was born. He said the contradictions of capitalism would cause people to look for solutions, and a “false” path people would find was that indeed capitalism had to be overcome. But that they had to return to a pre-capitalist life, return to the land and to feudalistic idealisms. Fascist Italy literally had “guilds”…

Marx said these “anti-capitalists” would see value in communist rhetoric, because they agreed with communists half-way. But they missed that the only solution is to move forward. That before capitalism, there were contradictions that inevitably led to capitalism, and it would just happen again.

Fascism is literally miopic anti-capitalism. It’s what happens to actual justifiable dissatisfaction and anger at the system without theory and understanding.

Yes, fascism really does sound like communism. It’s the goal, it’s how it’s born. It SOUNDS like communism, but has none of the solutions or the substance.

I honestly don't see how literally all politics don't boil down to "apes together strong".

Some of them have smart apes manipulating the rest to use their strength against their own interest. Some of them have apes going together using their strength to enforce things we don't agree with, like racist tribalism/nationalism. But it's all a matter of people cooperating to enforce and otherwise enable what they think they need to, to meet their goal.

Funnily enough, even the fascists agree. The man who convinced me of that fact, and thus of socialism compared to social democracy, was Jordan "Literally a Nazi" Peterson.

In some rant of his he threw out some factoid to claim that population growth can keep expanding forever because "each new worker produces seven times more resources than they will consume in their life"

Regardless of the literal brain damage it takes to come to that conclusion from that factoid, the actual numbers aren't far off. It's a bit more complicated but the result is the same, a post scarcity society beset by parasites.

Evil spoon man 😢

scary socialism coming to give people a better life in general

Not technically; explicitly. Not the garbage they've been shoveled down their throats all this time. Real change with real benefits to the workers. But I guess they don't want that for whatever reason.

Could have been worse. You might have tricked them into socialism and then seen them turn it nationalist and give ownership to the police chief.

We got:

1. Double down and fix public perception/rectify the definition

2. Switch to a different term

3. Avoid terms all together, focus on ideas and values

4. Demolish any positive opinions of capitalism

Maybe there is more options, but to me #2 is probably a losing strategy, as conservatives/fascists will continue to dirty whatever new label is made, just as they've done with everything else. It'll just get us back to square 1.

A mix of #1 and #3 is probably the move. Get everybody on board with the ideas and values, while making slow progress in the background on #1.

#4 is another one that can and should always be worked on

Sweden has something like 20% of housing under housing cooperatives which I like as a Mutualist who doesn't like shareholder ownership or government ownership.

Yes. You should read some basic anarchist theory, it's all about working together.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_aid