[Derek]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

command economies inevitably tank.

there’s a sensible balance between free enterprise and regulation, and nobody is offering it right now.

e.g., fixing obamacare, maybe along swiss lines.

I mean my perspective is that obamacare won't need fixed if universal healthcare is introduced. Most major first world countries in the world have it and with the amount of money in the US there is no reason not to implement it. This isn't a fantasy. A centrist stands for nothing except the status quo. Why put your hands up and go "let's just be managers of the chaos cause we can't hope for anything better!". At least a fascist believes in something, as repulsive as they are.

i don’t know. i don’t make the laws, much less in california. but was she guilty of prosecutorial misconduct? or was she doing her job?

She was 'just doing her job', the point being that her job is fundamentally oppressive and goes against the interests that she's trying to pretend she cares about now. There's no such thing as a 'progressive prosecutor' nor will the left accept one as a candidate at this point.

i guess you’re too young to have seen first hand the consequences of leninism but the history books are there. it was a fucking disaster. stalinism was not an accident but a logical consequence. lenin is not funny.

Do you remember Lenin being around? How old are you really symbol man? I have read a lot of Marx and Lenin's works, with Lenin mostly expounding on the framework that Marx built. That part of Russian history is very complicated but Americans seem to have a very particular view of Lenin. "Communism killed 100 million people!" (that figure is easily debatable too) Autocratic communism failed for multiple reasons, but it is nothing in comparison to the death toll that capitalism has inflicted. Of course Stalin was an authoritarian brute and I love fighting with tankies (supporters of Stalin) in left-wing spaces, but the circumstances in which Lenin and Stalin led (and their motives) are different. I know Americans are sort of taught to think of them as one in the same. You can gleam good political insight from Lenin's writings and also learn from his mistakes from when they were put in practice. The post-capitalist communist state I and so many others desire has nothing to do with Russia though beyond theory.

as for bernie, of course he looks attractive if you can believe his promises. i don’t. they’re fictions. macroeconomics always wins. it’s like gravity.

How are universal healthcare, free college etc. fictions? Nearly every other developed country has them! They are basic necessities that the majority of the Western world has and from a socialist point of view is literally the bare minimum for a fairer society. How much does the US spend on their overbloated military? And you're telling me the guy with cancer who makes $20k a year and needs $100k on gofundme can't get his life saving treatment paid for? What a mess. Macroeconomics means nothing to people suffering needlessly.


What Bernie is proposing is a basic version of the Scandinavian system. I don't think that goes far enough for the damage that's been caused! The question is that can America accept anything further than that right now considering there is a lot of right-wing rhetoric and neoliberal institutionalism that's been free to fester and now needs to be undone?

do you think scotland will attemp a second uk splinter and rejoin europe after brexit? what about the possibility of irish reunification? im not up to date on those issues.

I honestly don't know. No one does. I voted for Scottish independence at the time but I don't think it's the right time to try again. My gf works for a paper that fully supports independence and there will always be a certain percentage of people who think it's the best way to go, but we'll see what mainstream opinion becomes when Brexit becomes a bit more do or die (no constituency in Scotland voted for Brexit so the Scottish government's argument is that we're being dragged into something we didn't vote for and that independence is always a viable route out of it... it won't be that easy though). I only see the Irish situation getting worse, because on Brexit terms they'll need to betray the Good Friday agreement and peace has always been on condition. I couldn't go to my class last week because there was an IRA bomb threat. That's new for me!