AirBNB pays taxes too. They don’t circumvent the system in Barcelona, that was fixed a long time ago. Now they just displace locals because the nightly rate is higher than the monthly rate. Even if it’s empty most of the time. Which is a real shame.
It’s going to hurt small time renters. I stayed in an AirBNB in 2013, it was rented out by a lovely family. It was a fantastic experience, staying in a nice neighborhood off the beaten path. We stayed for a few months, too, and we were respectful, not puking all over the place etc. A lot of locals invested in furnishing rentals for AirBNB. At least, that was the scene 9 years ago. No idea what it’s like now.
I can’t wait to put your Sweady balls in my mouth.
Wendy’s chicken nuggets are vile, too. Chicken tenders are the only thing good. And Wendy’s doesn’t serve them anymore. Neither does McDonald’s. So… KFC wins.
And the taste.
Three condoms? My, we’re young and frisky, aren’t we?
The reason I didn’t take your examples of “Communist countries tremendous success” seriously is because you were comparing apples to oranges. Seriously, comparing starvation to food insecurity is ludicrous. It is possible to actually compare deaths from starvation per 100,000 people, but that’s not what you did. Because to do that, you’d have to A) rely on something other than propaganda and B) Recognize that China hasn’t entirely eliminated hunger, much less deaths from starvation. Although they have made great progress in reducing the numbers since their series of famines. You also ignored that the Soviet Union didn’t experience famine because they relied on foreign aid - food aid - for a number of years. So that helped keep their people fed: Food given freely by capitalist pigs who deserve to be murdered for their mere existence in a more successful economy.
As for the great purge, it was followed by years of lesser purges.
The idea that the west does not change courses or look at past programs as a mistake is obviously quite invalid, so there was no point in even mentioning it. But since you cling to that idea, great. Obviously we’ve changed our minds on some things, as the Trail of Tears is now seen as wrong, as is the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. Slavery and Jim Crow fall into those categories as well. The War on Drugs is also seen as a failure, despite the fact that it totters on for now.
I don’t watch John Oliver, moron. There is no nuance in this discussion because you are clearly incapable of it.
You are right about one thing: My horror over the deaths caused by communism, including the killing of kulaks, is why I am not a communist. Your gleeful appreciation of the righteousness of democide under communism doesn’t make you a communist. It makes you deeply disturbed individual who is incapable of empathy. It likely points to sociopathy, or some other element of the dark triad, with the political beliefs adopted as a fig leaf to cover your antisocial tendencies.
I don’t expect a response.
Wow, you are full of nonsense. If you have to resort to comparing someone to the Nazis to show they’re not too bad, you’re already up shit creek without a paddle.
Funny, you mention Nazis multiple times in your apologia of Soviet democide, but what you fail to mention is that, rather than murdering “Nazi collaborators” during the de-kulakization period, Soviet leaders were not opposed to Nazism at any point until 1941, when the Nazi betrayed their non-aggression pact and invaded the USSR. Prior to that, they had been on rather cordial terms, dividing up their respective “spheres of influence” (ie deciding who got to raid which countries). The partition, invasion, and occupation of Poland by Nazis and Soviets is a perfect example of this, but there are many others.
No, the Kulaks did not deserve it, you filthy chekist. No more than the US middle class deserves to be brutally murdered. Or US farmers deserve to be brutally murdered (since they are land rich and cash poor). Nobody deserved that. That was not justice, that was an out of control murderous mob. Frequently the locals didn’t even support the murdering of their local landlords and farmers, but outsiders roaming the countryside pressured them to anyways. When even the outsiders wouldn’t murder enough people, the secret police took over and did a fantastic job committing democide.
The Soviets burned a lot more than antisemetic books. You seriously think they killed capitalists, but left the pro-capitalism books intact? That doesn’t even make sense. The USSR burned loads of books, started with “decadent” western authors, but quickly spreading to anyone critical of the regime. Funnily enough, one of the first people to organize book burnings in Soviet libraries later found his own writing was include in the list of works to be destroyed.
This isn’t a Gish gallop. You were welcome to respond with actual examples of the “incredible successes” of the communist countries. But instead you are godwining the thread, and bringing up the war on drugs, which is a wattabooutism - a deflection technique designed to derail the argument. I don’t consider the war on drugs to be an incredible success, so I’m not really sure how it’s relevant.
Actually most of my knowledge comes from primary sources. People who lived it and wrote or talked about what it was really like. Since you got your hands on something describing “incredible successes” in the USSR and China than obviously you were the one reading propaganda. Or perhaps you consider starving millions of people in the Holodomer and Great Famine to be an incredible success? Killing the kulaks? Incredible success. Book burnings? Incredible success. Cultural revolution? Believe it or not, also incredible success.
Neat! Thanks for the tip. I’ll check it out.
MTV was really great in the 80s. Sorry it went downhill so fast and so long… It’s really insane that they can’t just make a channel with all music videos. Call it OG MTV or something.
Great? Maybe not. The best we’ve found for economic development and continued economic growth? So far, yes.
All systems have strengths and weaknesses. All economic systems require intervention to prevent bad actors from exploiting them. If you think communism doesn’t, it’s because you aren’t actually familiar with it.
Again, I highly recommend that you read about twentieth century USSR and China, especially the early days of Mao, Lenin, and Stalin. Because you don’t seem very familiar with communism for someone named after Karl Marx.
Capitalism isn’t a magic antidote. Nor are all iterations of it successful. It really depends on the government keeping corruption under control, keeping monopolies from forming, keeping regulatory capture from occurring. Also, capitalism is just an economic system. There’s also political systems, legal systems, financial systems, military systems, all sorts of other government functions.
Capitalism is actually working pretty well in Asia. China is doing tremendously better since they introduced some capitalism into their socialist system, creating a mixed economy. Their growth has lifted a lot of people out of poverty. Other Asian economies have performed very well. Look at Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and (at least prior to Chinese takeover) Hong Kong.
Latin America and Africa have a lot of complex problems, many stemming from years - or even centuries - of colonialism, military conflicts, social issues, endemic corruption, bad economic policy like “printing money” and trying to spend their way out of inflation, thereby creating hyperinflation, etc. Expecting an economic system to magically fix all the incredibly complex and even seemingly intractable issues in a society is quite unrealistic.
I never suggested you should be grateful for everything and anything that happens to you. That’s really not necessary to practice gratitude on occasion. And your brain doesn’t automatically turn into mush that’s incapable of recognizing exploitation or injustice.
You make it sound like another person’s labor is the only thing that deserves gratitude.
And no, I’m not suggesting you should be grateful to god. I’m an atheist.
Are you familiar with twentieth century Chinese or Soviet history? If you are impressed by communism, you really should read up on what happened in nations that implemented it, or attempted to implement it, in the last hundred years.
Communism doesn’t redistribute power to the lower classes. It redistributes power to the Communist Party members - usually an inner circle. The people who are running the massive government that is required to operate a nation with all the central planning that communism requires. The new privileged class becomes the top technocrats and their families.
It’s impossible for wealth distribution to be equal. Wealth is not just money, it is also assets. Say you strip all the assets away from people - let’s say housing - and redistribute it. OK - Now everyone has a house. But all houses are not created equal. Some houses are nicer than others. Some locations are nicer than others. Everyone will want to move into the nicest house in the nicest city, but obviously they can’t all fit. So what do you do? Someone has to work on the farm and grow wheat. How do you force people to work on a collective farm? What about people who don’t want to work? Do they get the same housing as the workers who contribute to society? Even if you house everyone, including providing free housing for those who won’t pay, what about the people who don’t WANT to live in a house? Do you force them to live in a detention center? What about their kids? They keep having more kids… Do you forcibly sterilize them, or do you put their kids into an orphanage, hoping that the state can do a better job raising workers than their lazy parents? And then, what about the homeless? The people who actually prefer living outside? Obviously if they refuse to live in their house, they have fewer assets than others. Now your society isn’t equal anymore, it’s just made some changes in who have wealth.
Yes, socialism can be made more efficient. The trick to it is my introducing a mix of capitalism so you have a mixed market economy. Like in China.
Am I a reformist? It depends on what you want to reform, and what kind of reform you’re talking about. I’d like to see more direct democracy, which I believe can be achieved in my home country through reforms. But in some other countries, it can only be achieved via revolution. For economic systems, a mix of capitalism and socialism seems to be the best thing we’ve found so far. No doubt a better economic system will be discovered someday. But it is not communism. Communism is too extreme. It’s not a good system, and it has failed everywhere it’s been tried.
Well, I am referring to actual communism, not the fantasy kind.
Wealth distribution is not equal under communism. Most is owned by the state, the privileged class still exists. The underprivileged class also exists.
Communism tends to be inefficient and less productive than capitalism, so a lot less is produced. This is demonstrated time and again. People just don’t have a personal motivation to increases production for the state. Distribution is also inefficient. Historically it leads to hunger because central planning is less effective than a decentralized system where individuals are able to make decisions.
So while I agree that the current level of wealth inequality is not good, communism is certainly not the solution. All it does is change where the lines of inequality are drawn. It usually kills a few million people for no good reason, too.
Given that we now have a track record of communism, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would choose it.
Their situation could easily be the setting of a dystopian novel written 30 years ago. Your nightmare future is essentially the Matrix.
By the way, people have been kept alive and prevented from killing themselves to allow further torture for a long time. It’s why there’s doctors at Guantanamo Bay. And suicide watch in prison.
You were handed many things on a plate… This planet, nature, air, our current level of science, technology, civilization, development, law and order, music, literature, even the very fact that you exist and are human. You did nothing to earn any of it. You may have bought your iPhone and paid for the internet service that you’re using, but they were not created for you, and you had no hand in their development.
I think people are starting to catch on to that. Maybe I’m overly optimistic though.