What you described is just welfare, not socialism. Socialism is collective ownership of the means of production, meaning there would be no need to re-distribute wealth as it would be fairly distributed from the start.
What you’re thinking of is more along the lines of what Scandinavian countries have, which is just capitalism with social democracy and extensive welfare programs.
I’m speedrunning this shit.
In my experience growing up southern baptist Christians only bring up that interpretation when convenient. The Old Testament is completely valid when they want it to be, and invalid when they don’t.
I hate how well this analogy works.
This is an idea explored in The Egg by Andy Weir.
Yes, multiple voices, probably debating what I’m going to cook for dinner later. At this point I might be going a bit too far anthropomorphizing the voices, it’s not like actual separate personalities, they’re all me. It’s more like perspective taking. I’m engaging in a conversation with myself and the different voices will take different stances. For example I might have a “lazy voice” that just wants to eat leftovers and a “craving voice” that wants to cook tacos. I decide what to do by having the voices hash it out.
As I’m describing this it all sounds very intentional and like I’m playing pretend, but it really is just automatic.
If a word does not adequately describe what I’m thinking I just use more words, or I get creative with them and use them in new ways. I guess that’s what makes me prone to getting lost in thought for long periods of time or being very long winded when I’m talking to people. When I’m talking about something I’ve recently been very interested in people often have to cut me off because I’ll essentially start verbalizing my thought process to them and forget they’re there.
For me it’s not that I can’t think without words, it’s just that the words are very useful tools for organizing my thoughts. I’ve been doing it all my life though so it doesn’t really require more effort than thinking in concepts. It’s like breathing, it happens automatically but I can stop or control it if I want to. When I stop my inner voice I would describe my thoughts as sort of fuzzy and ephemeral. I would easily forget them or have difficulty expressing them without first putting them into words.
That does make me wonder if maybe I use my inner voice as a bit of a crutch when I’m reading, but I think it helps me infer tone and get immersed in what I’m reading. Perhaps I am sacrificing some reading speed but I do believe it helps me with comprehension and memory.
Though I will add that it’s more the concepts that I remember than the words themselves. Give me a quote and I couldn’t tell you what page and where on the page it was, but I could tell you what was happening in that scene, what happened before and after, what the character was feeling and why they said it, who they said it to and so on.
Learning to get over religious shame and guilt took quite some time for me, and I still have to catch myself sometimes when an inner voice says things I no longer believe/agree with. Part of getting over that meant cultivating other voices. When one voice bites another bites back lol.
As a plus I’m very good in a debate.
That’s what irks me the most, when people act like abstaining from an election is a grand act of protest that will change things for the better. I understand the reluctance to vote, but that should never be accompanied by a reluctance to act.
Perhaps! I also think internal monologues can develop just from learning to read and write silently. Having an inner voice makes it easier to absorb the information in a book or to plan out your writing in advance.
Your anecdote seems to support that it’s a learned behavior/skill, which tracks for me. I have a very active internal dialogue that’s difficult to turn off. I say dialogue instead of monologue because I often make up “other voices” that bounce ideas off each other, and this generally happens without my conscious effort. I think I developed this because as I was growing up I was encouraged to pray regularly, and I was very fanatically religious as a kid so I did so as often as I could. I prayed silently so often in fact that my thoughts were basically a constant one-sided monologue directed to god. Whenever I would daydream or let my imagination wander I would imagine god responding, and eventually the constant monologue became a dialogue. I would work out problems or make decisions by having conversations with an imaginary god. When I stopped believing in god the second voice never went away, I just started recognizing it as my own.
Imagine enforcing shitty copyright laws on yourself like some code of honor. We developed the technology to make infinite copies of any media and then spend endless resources fighting it because it undermines our parasitic economic model.
Imagine for a moment that society embraced the full potential of digital technology. We could have a library of all human art and knowledge ever produced available for free, instantly, everywhere. If book libraries didn’t already exist and were proposed today the excuses for rejecting it would be the same. The answer is also the same, change our economic model to support people’s basic needs unconditionally and directly subsidize the production we need/want (like art).
Craigslist was always on the fringes, before Facebook marketplace came in there were a bunch of separate and disconnected online marketplaces. Facebook marketplace had the advantage of already having a massive user base (larger than any of the existing online marketplaces), causing it to become the largest one right out the gate, which then of course makes it the most attractive option for sellers since they will reach more people.
Biden needs to do whatever he needs to do to get elected.
Up to and including supplying weapons and funding for a genocide? This position is morally reprehensible. I’m sympathetic to the argument that people should still vote for Biden for harm reduction, but suggesting Biden’s support for Israel’s genocide is justified because it helps him get elected is way over the line.
What’s your opinion of the Bolsheviks?
Feng shui is a complicated mystical framework placed over “arranging my stuff in certain ways makes me feel good.” It’s an art that gets treated like a science. There is some actual value there if it would drop the scientific pretense and mysticism.
No I certainly don’t. These protests are not unique in how successful they are at challenging the status quo. The police state is also very effective at suppressing them, which is precisely why they are important. It’s a constant push and pull, we gain ground and we lose it, but if people didn’t protest at all we would only lose it.
Your insistence on sitting on your ass and waiting for violent revolution while whinging about protestors not doing anything is lazy and cowardly.
The frontier of resistance is everywhere, and even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. The day will come when all these protests and demonstrations, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the status quo’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.
That last paragraph was paraphrased from Andor, because it’s a simple enough concept that even a Disney show gets it.
I’ve noticed a trend in some new American media coming out of more openly positive depictions of socialism/communism. The new HBO The Last Of Us series for example has this scene, and the new Fallout series has a more centrist/neoliberal take but at least calls out how the right uses communist as a “dirty word,” though she qualifies the statement by first saying “I’m not a communist.”