See, Microsoft cares so much about you they’ll even make a backup of all of your emails, completely for free, without you even having to ask. And here you are complaining…

Oh no, someone criticized our glorious leader!

It’s because people somehow keep believing that voting for some politician is magically going to solve all their problems for them. It won’t. Things might get better for a little while if they actually DO end up passing some law that happens to work in your favor, but in the grand scheme of things, you’re better off not waiting for them to do anything and working to solve your own problems instead.

This goes for the left and the right BTW. Both have an unhealthy obsession with this sort of mindset.

As a Christian, I agree with this idea and I also find the proposed law rather silly because it’s the same kind of virtue signaling that conservatives love to accuse liberals of.

What I don’t understand is why the article considers this “standing up for LGBT+ rights”. Can anyone help me with that?

Unfortunately, unless you also follow the Bible to a larger degree than they do, it makes you just as much of a hypocrite.

To be fair, the Bible says nothing about having to follow the pope in order to get to heaven.

In fact, one could even argue that Jesus would not have approved of such an institution, because in Matthew 23:9, he explicitly says this:

Do not call anyone on earth your father; for One is your Father, He who is in heaven.

Meanwhile, the verse that the Catholic church bases the legitimacy of the papacy on (Matthew 16:18) is far more vague:

And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.

Yes, I know, but what do you expect me to say when you don’t respond to any of my other arguments?

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.

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Okay, honestly, would you eat a Bill Gates or Elon Musk? They don’t look particularly tasty to me. Bezos maybe, he seems to be in good shape (although likely chock full of steroids), but the vast majority of them are frumpy old dudes or dudettes who probably taste like leather. I don’t think that eating them would be particularly enjoyable.

This isn’t about whether or not billionaires are essential, but whether getting rid of them would substantially change anything.

Assume, for instance, that we make owning (or earning) more than a billion dollars (per year) illegal by putting a 100% tax on every dollar afterwards. Then billionaires would simply move most of their assets abroad or find some other loophole that lets them avoid this, like setting up a bunch of smaller companies that each have $999 million. Unless the whole world follows suit, it won’t change anything, and that’s not going to happen because any country that’s willing to give them a safe haven would make a killing by doing so.

Also, if this DID happen, what makes you think they’d continue to work trying to make more money and not just spend more time playing golf instead? Whatever revenue you’d expect in taxes would simply not occur because once there’s no more incentive to earn more, there’s no more incentive to produce. Ironically, it would probably lead to far more quasi-billionaires because other multi-millionaires would likely pick up the slack where the big guys throw the towel, but I don’t see how regular people would benefit.

But perhaps you can explain what you have in mind?

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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.

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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

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