Animal Farm
The plot reads like a sunday school scare piece to warn children about the dangers of satanism. It’s so vague and allegorical that you can’t really critique it. The message is basically “if you revolt against the capitalists, a scary bad man will take over and hurt you.” Also pretty disgusting that it portrays workers as farm animals and capitalists as humans. It’s a very “American schools during the Cold War would make kids read that” kind of book.
It’s not surprising that Orwell was a bigoted snitch who ratted leftists out to British intelligence, and was especially keen on turning in jews, black people, homosexuals, and anyone he deemed “anti-white.”
https://bennorton.com/george-orwell-list-leftists-snitch-british-government/
I’ll also throw in Asimov’s review of 1984 while I’m ranting about this creep
http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm
framework for statecraft
I kinda give side-eye to anyone really fond of the word statecraft. It’s sort of an “I look up to a lot of neoliberal ghouls” shibboleth.
Europe also benefits from literally trillions of dollars a year in net wealth extracted from the global south.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X
fucking communist countries have killed how many millions of their own citizens
Most of these articles cite the Black Book of Communism, which goes to absurd lengths to inflate the death toll of Communism, for example counting all the millions of nazi and soviet soldiers killed on the eastern front as victims of communism, counting the entire death toll of the Vietnam war, and even counting declining birth rates as deaths due to communism.
Noam Chomsky used the same methodology to argue that, according to Black Book logic, capitalism in India alone, from 1947–1979, could be blamed for more deaths than communism worldwide from 1917–1979.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160921084037/http://www.spectrezine.org/global/chomsky.htm
The Sapply model runs into the exact same problem the video is focusing on.
When you take the quiz at https://sapplyvalues.github.io you get questions like “Agree or disagree: Only the government can fairly and effectively regulate organizations” — but what kind of government are we talking about? Who’s in charge? Are there corporate think tanks running it? Is there a fossil fuel lobby? Are we talking about corporations regulating themselves?
When I get a question like that, I don’t know how to respond, because I don’t have a blanket attitude toward all government. My opinion depends on what is actually happening in real life. Which is ultimately the central criticism of the video. What matters most to most people is the material context, not some blanket feeling about the abstract concept of government
hexbear had an entire thread with hundreds of comments where they all agreed they hated trump and viewed him as an odious fascist
https://lemmy.ml/post/4040923?scrollToComments=true
The closest thing you find to support for trump in there is some of them thinking he is a less effective imperialist.
Socialism means the state has social support networks, but largely works under capitalist rules
What you’re describing is “social democracy” — capitalism with safety nets, where production is still controlled by owners rather than workers. “Socialism” explicitly implies worker control of production. “Nordic socialism” could more accurately be called “Nordic social democracy.”
“Communism” refers to a classless, stateless society where everyone has what they need, no one is exploited or coerced, and there are no wars. It’s an aspirational vision for the future, not something you can do right after a revolution when capitalism still rules the world.
“support for Russia” — opposition to NATO is not support for Russia. This isn’t a fucking football game.
“support for Trump” — The other day I sent you a huge thread where they all fucking hate Trump and agree he is an odious fascist.
Hexbear does not support Trump. The consensus view on hexbear is that Trump is more dangerous domestically, but Biden is more dangerous internationally, and they are both monstrous people who are terrible for the planet. Many hexbears voted for biden as harm reduction but it barely felt like harm reduction, and when you look at the whole planet, maybe it wasn’t. Trump is a fascist but also an isolationist. Biden is not a fascist, although he does virtually nothing to combat the fascists, but he is also more likely to start wars, coups, or inflict austerity on the global south, which is something people should care about. 9 million people starve to death every fucking year and America has huge international influence to make that worse or better. America supported the fucking siege in Yemen. America destroyed Libya — and that was the fucking Obama administration. I saw a study that tallied it all up and concluded that America has caused the deaths of 4.5 million people in the middle east since 9/11. And for that matter, Biden’s not great domestically either! There’s been virtually no pushback from the Biden administration against any of the fascist bullshit happening in this country. Florida legalized kidnapping children for forced conversion therapy and Biden won’t even say the word trans.
libs: this man will be the next hitler
also libs: I stand with trump after this appalling act