If being against war is a bannable offense and makes me a Nazi, so be it.

Thanks. Enjoy your wars in Israel and the Ukraine.

You know what’s actually funny is that one side has spent the past several years posting cute, adorable frogs while getting arrested and prosecuted for trespassing at the Capitol in a mostly peaceful demonstration, while the other has caused billions in property damage with violent riots across the country that claimed far more human lives before trying to lock everyone in their homes and threatening them with losing their livelihoods unless they agree to an experimental medical treatment, and is now involved in funding not one, but two new wars overseas to the tune of a hundred billion dollars while explaining that cute, adorable frogs are inherently racist, and somehow people still have trouble figuring out who the good guys are.

Warmongerers or cute frogs? Cute frogs or warmongerers? IDK, why is this so hard?

Both are entertainers playing to an audience.

The former.

“They’re turning the frogs racist!”

Sounds like something leftist Alex Jones (John Oliver?) would say.

Good. It appears we’ve reached an understanding, then.

Why would you try to troll me unless you were upset?

Only to say that I find it hilarious that SatansMaggotyCumFart would get upset when our glorious leader is criticized. Really speaks for itself, doesn’t it.

Like I GAF what SatansMaggotyCumFart has to say.

Oh no, someone criticized our glorious leader!

My bad. I fixed it.

You’re working on the assumption that violence just creates random inequality whenever it occurs, rather than that the use of violence in our current system is a tool used with intent to maintain the status quo.

Well, you’re working on the assumption that violence CAN be used to create both inequality and equality, it just depends on who is using it. Since it’s obviously nonsensical to argue that it’s literally the person that’s making the difference (otherwise, monarchy could potentially do just as good a job at creating or maintaining equality as communism could), it must be the intention behind the use of violence that makes the difference.

That leads to the unproven assertion that it is the intention of capitalism to create unjust inequality, when instead the intention is to allow people to freely choose their employment or source of income based on what they do best, and reward people based on how much they contribute to society.

Sure, you can say that maybe that used to be the case at one point and it’s all gone out of whack since then, but that would only prove that intention doesn’t guarantee outcome, hence there would be no reason to assume that communism would have any better chance at creating a better outcome for everyone in the long run.

Deciding we shouldn’t make any change to our economic system because police would still be necessary is, frankly, an absurd stance to take. To be clear, communism is not an alternative to democracy, it’s an economic not political system, though of course its ideals do align with democracy.

If communism isn’t a political system, why does it require a revolution in order to implement? If it’s only about economics, then it should be possible to implement on a smaller scale (say, a single company) in any political system. And if it is so clearly superior to capitalism, then such a company would outperform its competitors and naturally lead to a proliferation of communism that way, because most or all of its competitors would end up adopting it. Yet you never see any communists arguing for that sort of approach, it’s always “smash everything with fist first and then rebuild from the ashes”. That’s why I can’t help but feel like violence is, in fact, the whole point.

So you don’t support any political system? Or do you have some magic solution in which everyone magically lives in harmony?

Neither. I don’t support any political system because politics is simply arguing about who gets to point the gun at whom. Any political solution to anything always involves violence. And I don’t have a magical solution either because the only alternative I see is to educate people in order to help them realize this, in the hopes that one day, enough people will see that there can, in fact, never be a political solution without violence, and therefore stop looking for such solutions and instead work together to try and resolve their disputes on their own instead of looking for another powerful man with a gun to get them what’s theirs.

Indeed, Preview really is excellent. Does almost everything you’ll ever need and nothing you don’t.

I’m on Windows 11 and it opens PDF files in Edge by default. While I find it kind of silly to use a web browser for that purpose, the built-in PDF reader is actually fairly good, it can even read your documents out loud using text-to-speech.

violence isn’t part of democracy itself.

That’s where you wrong, because violence IS part of democracy, since the majority gets to inflict its will on the minority (or at least choose representatives who will do so on their behalf) via the use of the police, who are authorized to use any violence necessary in order to get people to comply with the laws.

If communism doesn’t have any plans for achieving their goals without the use of police (or violent enforcers by any other name), then it stands to reason that it will just be violence-based as that which is it seeks to replace, and therefore just as prone to causing inequality among people, regardless of its intentions.

As I said before, violence will never lead to peace, at best you will get a temporary truce whenever people are tired of fighting. But it will always be prone to erupt again. That’s why I don’t support communism. And yes, I don’t support democracy, monarchy, or dictatorship either, for the same reason.

You realize that getting upset over this isn’t helping to prove your point, right? If anything, it proves you’re out of arguments and you think you can bully me into into accepting your point of view.

Sorry, not going to happen.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought Marx passionately and repeatedly made the case that violence and inequality in a capitalist system are intrinsically connected, i.e. that a capitalist system requires violence in order to enforce and maintain the inequality that is present. But you (and Marx) also say that communists can (and should) violence to bring about equality.

My question, therefore, is simply this: if inequality is the result of violence, how can communism ever hope to achieve equality in the future by using the same means that it claims causes inequality in the present? That’s simply fighting fire with fire. If their violence justifies our violence, our violence will justify theirs. And on and on it goes. No amount of violence will ever stop violence. It just won’t.

Okay, that was always allowed.

Right. I believe that idea is called socialism, not communism. Unlike communism, which demands a complete overthrow and reform of the system in order to be established, socialists are generally happy to bring about reform within the system by just passing laws requiring various amounts of wealth redistribution.

I’m certainly not against it as long as it doesn’t remove too many incentives for people to be able to improve their standard of living by working harder. Having a reasonable social safety system that ensures nobody has to live on the streets unless they absolutely want to certainly seems desirable. And yes the US could probably improve in that area.

Okay, but that’s excusing one genocide with another genocide.

The difference is that capitalism doesn’t require genocide in order to establish itself, even if it sometimes occurs in the pursuit of it. Or are you saying that when people first figured out to, say, use sea shells as a method of accounting and facilitating trade, it involved killing a bunch of people before anyone was convinced that it was preferable to trading goods against each other?

Capitalism (or free trade, rather) can evolve naturally and spontaneously among a group of individuals who seek to maximize everyone’s utility. When the currency had collapsed after WW2, people traded with cigarettes instead of money, even if they were non-smokers, because it was practical and convenient, no one forced them to. And yes, there was genocide before that, but it didn’t happen in order to get people to start trading in cigarettes.

Again, I’m not saying that capitalism is by definition non-violent, or that violence in pursuit of capitalism is more acceptable than it is in the pursuit of communism. Absolutely not. All I’m saying is that it can be non-violent, whereas communism always seems to make violence a prerequisite in order to get everyone on the same page.

Also, I think it would help any further discussion if we could make a distinction between capitalism and free trade, as the two are often conflated. There certainly is a case to be made about usury being bad, because it helps to increase and accelerate the divide between rich and poor, and always leads to wealth and power being concentrated in the hands of a few. The word “capitalism” kind of implies that it’s the capital doing the work, i.e. usury is part and parcel of the system, and then people tend to focus only on the predations of banks and neglect the advantages of free trade over forced association and planned economies as it is common under communism.

But there’s a reason the founding father of the US were so vehemently against the creation of a central bank. And it seems that they’re proven right by the fact that ever since our government decided to create one anyways, the gap between rich and poor has risen much faster than it used to. So maybe, just maybe, “capitalism” isn’t the root of our problems, but state-sponsored usury is, because when the government is in control of the money supply, they can always simply choose to arbitrarily inflate everyone’s wealth away, which always tends to hit the poor much harder than the rich, because they don’t have easy access to inflation-proof investments.