RockBottomIs your child far left?
You forgot “unconditionally supports russian imperialism and repeats its propaganda incessently” … wait, this isn’t lemmy.ml 🫠
Nobody should be lectured on propaganda by North American and European social democrats who infest Lemmy and spread propaganda to a much higher degree across most instances and communities.
social democrats
They have a better claim to leftism & socialism than the illiberal leftists & left-wing authoritarians who manifest inherently unequal, oppressive concentrations of authority & political power.
who manifest inherently unequal, oppressive concentrations of authority & political power.
Capitalism! (Which socdems completely support)
That’s a weird spelling for authoritarianism.
Social democrats support mixed economies with social safety nets.
Economic indexes show liberal democracies in Europe, Canada, East Asia, Australia including social democracies beat communist states (North Korea, China, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba) in lower economic inequality in terms of wealth & income. North Korea comes close, and that state overspends on military instead of lifting people out of poverty, thus allowing famines & food shortages to stunt growth & shorten life expectances by 12 years compared to their South Korean neighbors.
Both in principle & practice, non-authoritarian or liberal leftism beats left-wing authoritarianism. Left-wing authoritarianism is a bankrupt contradiction lacking legitimate claims to the central tenet of leftism of promoting equality. Such philosophies & governments don’t serve the people, they serve an exclusive, repressive regime of political party elites.
y0kai [he/him]Capitalism is authoritarianism.
Not even close: political systems (governance of people & their actions) aren’t economic system (goods & services), and authoritarianism is a political system.
Not even arguing about capitalism: left-wing authoritarianism is still everything I wrote regardless of capitalism. Those liberal democracies I mentioned still in principle limit authority of governments unlike those regimes whose shitty philosophies lack any such scruples: authoritarian philosophies authorize unlimited government power to repress universal rights & liberties. A non-exhaustive list of authorized abuses: the Soviets had their great purges; the Chinese communist party punishes generals for refusing to mass murder civilians, suppresses discussion of times they’ve sent tanks against civilians, persecutes the Uyghurs & Falun Gong, & represses the freedoms of its LGBT+ population to express themselves & form establishments on- & off-line to meet. These actions aren’t backslides from their philosophy.
When liberal democratic governments commit human rights abuses, their philosophy at least recognizes them as illegitimate backslides from that philosophy, and on recovery the people may freely try to hold their governments accountable as they freely condemn such injustices.
However, let’s appreciate the hypocrisy of your position. You’re posting your criticism of capitalism on a online system created in the free world, and you’re benefitting from the freedom to express yourself respected by your government, likely a liberal democracy with some form of mixed economy that includes capitalism. No government authority is shutting you down. We couldn’t safely claim the same if you criticized your government’s economic system from a state run by a left-wing authoritarian regime.
Even supposing capitalism is authoritarian in some way, it’s not the government. Left-wing authoritarianism purports to fight oppression by becoming (causing and perpetuating) oppression. Left-wing authoritarians replace their economic elites with political elites only unlike before, these elites can now run wild with unrestricted government authority to terrorize the masses: they claim that’s progress.
Rare footage from trial of Chinese general who defied Tiananmen crackdown order leaked online - Lemmy.World
Video shows Gen Xu Qinxian explaining why he refused to deploy troops to crush 1989 student-led demonstrations Rare footage of a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) general who defied orders to lead his troops into Tiananmen Square and crush the 1989 student protesters has been leaked online, offering a highly unusual glimpse into the upper echelons of the military at one of the most fraught moments in modern Chinese history. General Xu Qinxian’s refusal to take his troops from the PLA’s prestigious 38th Group Army, a unit based on the outskirts of Beijing, into the capital has been the stuff of Tiananmen lore for decades. The six-hour video recording of Gen Xu’s court martial hearing the next year sheds light on the rare act of defiance. In the video, Xu said he refused because he did not want to become “a sinner in history”.
Found the lib
found the fake leftist: doesn’t care about political inequality or unchecked oppression
unfreeradicalEconomics and politics are inseparable.
The great lie of liberalism is that a population may be free even while deprived.
At best, your argument rests on a shifting of the goalposts to construct a pretend purity.
Your source is an institution primarily funded by EU state apparatus, as shown on their on website. No shit they determined that some EU countries have less inequality than some socialist countries.
The problem in the methodology for comparing inequality in socialist countries vs capitalist countries comes from a few main factors:
More developed countries (as in higher GDP per capita) have less inequality than less developed countries. Communism has mostly spawned in post-colonial countries which have had only 70 years at best to develop and industrialize, compared to the 200 years of many western nations. A fairer comparison would be with countries of similar levels of development or similar starting points before socialism was implemented, for example comparing Cuba with Haiti or China with India.
Capitalist countries mainly provide access to goods and services through income/wealth, whereas socialist countries provide access to such things additionally through other methods. For example, if the economically poor (income + wealth) population in a socialist country are given housing for free or very cheap, universal access to healthcare and education, direct food aid either by state or community means, access to land for growing their food, good quality public transit systems, or access to sports and cultural facilities, this won’t appear as a form of income or wealth for the poorer percentiles.
The whole thing can be disproven by measuring actual outcomes at equal levels of development instead of measuring equality by means of income or wealth. Scientific studies measuring quality of life metrics instead of wealth or income have reached the conclusion that socialist countries provide better life outcomes at equal level of development compared to capitalist countries. If inequality truly was higher in socialist countries than in capitalist ones, we would expect worse life metrics, not better ones.