Should Communism Be Declared A Criminal Ideology?

[rainbow]

Sure there is. Right next to Rhodesia.

When-we, when-we, when-we iddle i-po?

[Scot Dutchy]

Was it somewhere near Tanganyika?

[DRSB]

If Socialism is about women empowerment, we are all socialists, aren't we?

Dominatrix specializes in turning ‘white, right-wing men’ into socialists

A growing wave of sex-positive feminists are working to usher in what they describe as a “pleasure revolution” in which women’s sexuality is embraced, rather than stigmatized, by both individuals and society at large. According to advocates of the movement, such as author and feminist Stephanie Theobold, the pleasure revolution is “about women asserting their own pleasure,” just as the #MeToo movement was about the problem of “men imposing their pleasure on women.” But for Reba Maybury, a 27-year-old political science professor and professional dominatrix, the larger problem is a historical power imbalance that she’s now working to correct in a unique fashion.

A socialist of mixed-race background, Maybury, who also goes by the name Mistress Rebecca, says that she had “always been fascinated by sex and notions of shame around sexuality,” particularly in regard to fetishes.

“I find it ridiculous how secretive people are about fetishes, because everybody has them. Some are just more extreme than others. For most people fetishes are quite subtle and sensitive,” she explains.

For many of her clientele, who are almost exclusively white right-wing men because she finds herself unable “to be even fictionally cruel to any other type of man,” that fetish is serving a powerful woman. Maybury derives her pleasure comes from forcing those men to see the contradiction between their love of powerful women and their support for political parties that actively work to limit women’s rights and empowerment. In her book, Dining with Humpty Dumpty, she detailed conversations with a man she said exhibited the “disgusting contradiction” of claiming to be both “a ‘female supremacist’ and a Tory.’”

“A lot of the book is about how people use political issues as a sexual fantasy and how that’s problematic,” Marbury explained in an interview with Centre Pompadour. “In the book, I decide to think about the power dynamic that exists between a dominatrix and her submissive. If he wants to really make me happy, which he says he does, what could possibly make me more happy than turning him into a socialist?”

https://womenintheworld.com/2018/11/30/ ... zVne7AVCOA

[DRSB]

Can you guess what association I am making?

"Lenin" sculpture by Sergei Konenkov, USSR, 1947

[Rum]

I can see what you *might* be suggesting, but Konenkov was a loyal Soviet citizen if my memory serves. A famous sculptor - who for my money did knock off Rodins. As far as I am aware he was never subversive of the Soviet system that is.

[laklak]

People make WAY too much out of what ought to be simple fucking.

[JimC]

People make WAY too much out of what ought to be simple fucking.

But you need 3 somersaults and a half pike to please the East German judge...

[Forty Two]

Indeed, but it is the capitalism that has benefited them.

But? I agree that capitalism has benefited the Chinese economy, but again, it's difficult to argue that the government owned and run aspect of the economy has not. I remind you once more about the 10% average GDP growth over a period of 30 years, compared to The US's ♥%.

Are you perchance trying to argue that China does capitalism better than the US? Or maybe that Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama were inveterate socialists?

The 10% growth did not begin until the capitalist reforms.

No, I'm not trying to argue that China does capitalism better than the US or other first world capitalist countries. I already noted that a mature economy cannot grow at the same rate as a country who is rising from a comparatively tiny economy with a comparatively massive population lifting itself from what amounts to our 19th century into the 20th and 21st.

If it was the socialism that was the economic driver,then why did it just coincidentally start succeeding 40 years after it started, and at about the same time as China implemented its capitalist reforms? Just a coincidence?

[rainbow]

Indeed, but it is the capitalism that has benefited them.

But? I agree that capitalism has benefited the Chinese economy, but again, it's difficult to argue that the government owned and run aspect of the economy has not. I remind you once more about the 10% average GDP growth over a period of 30 years, compared to The US's ♥%.

Are you perchance trying to argue that China does capitalism better than the US? Or maybe that Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama were inveterate socialists?

The 10% growth did not begin until the capitalist reforms.

No, I'm not trying to argue that China does capitalism better than the US or other first world capitalist countries. I already noted that a mature economy cannot grow at the same rate as a country who is rising from a comparatively tiny economy with a comparatively massive population lifting itself from what amounts to our 19th century into the 20th and 21st.

If it was the socialism that was the economic driver,then why did it just coincidentally start succeeding 40 years after it started, and at about the same time as China implemented its capitalist reforms? Just a coincidence?

Who said:

Look, Venezuela was hailed a shining example of socialism, until it imploded.

[Forty Two]

However, in socialist countries - those with the State owning and/or controlling the means of production by and large, what is equality like there? Was there greater "equality" in communist Soviet Union? Communist Cuba? Socialist Venezuela? Is that "equality?"

Only a complete twat would believe that your examples of State Capitalism equate to Socialism.

By definition if a system allows elites to hold privileges not available to the masses then it isn't "Socialist".

...no matter what the systems may call themselves

Only a complete twat thinks Cuba, Venezuela or the Soviet Union weren't capitalist? LOL. Look, Venezuela was hailed a shining example of socialism, until it imploded.

Sez who?
You, not me.

...sez who? Michael Moore, Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, Owen Jones, Richard Burgon, Chris Williamson, Young Labour in general, the International Socialist Review http://www.isreview.org/issues/54/venezuela.shtml -- praising the awesome achievements of Venezuela under socialism...

What spectacular results are they talking about? The International Socialist Review gives a list of examples:

social expenditures doubled as share of GDP;
subsidized food for the poor;
tax-paid health care for the poor;
subsidized college education for low-income families;
a higher minimum wage.
All these measures are well within the realm of what progressive politicians in Europe and North America often claim as achievements or aspirations. The US War on Poverty, for example, created Medicaid (tax-paid health care for the poor), substantially expanded food stamps (de facto subsidized food), and tripled the share of income that Americans get from government handouts.

Federal student loans fill the function of college subsides, and raising the minimum wage is a popular item on Democrats’ political to-do list, proceeding in states and municipalities across the nation.

Hugo Chávez’s political rap sheet is longer, but these reforms were instrumental to his socialist transformation of Venezuela. They were also the reforms that were most widely applauded by socialists looking to Venezuela for inspiration. In fact, while many socialist commentators want to weigh in on the “true” nature of Venezuelan socialism, the global left is practically unanimous in its praise for the aforementioned reforms.

Therefore, it is fair to ask: if those reforms were good-enough socialist back then, and if they remain in place in Venezuela today, then why should we not look to Venezuela to learn what socialism does to a country?

To achieve their goals, the socialists in Caracas have used extensive price regulations, forcing businesses to sell everything from toilet paper and food to cars and electricity under production cost. The unsurprising consequence has been dramatic shortages pushing the country to mass starvation, alongside epidemic crime and rampant black-market trade. Mob rule has de facto replaced law and order.

This downside of the socialist project makes socialists either scramble for scapegoats or outright deny that Venezuela is socialist. Yet the policies that created the shortages were exactly the policies that advanced socialism. To provide more products to more people — especially essentials like food — the Chávez regime imposed price controls and even took over private businesses. The former aimed at making consumer products “affordable”; the latter was motivated by an ambition to eliminate “capitalist greed,” also known as profits.

At the end of the day, socialism is all about economic redistribution. The degree of misery imposed by socialism is proportionate to the degree of redistribution. Venezuela is socialist; they just happened to go a bit further in their ambitions than other socialist nations, like the Scandinavian welfare states. Logically, the consequences have been more extreme. But that is, really, all there is to the Venezuelan tragedy: more of a bad ideology.

https://www.aier.org/article/socialists ... -venezuela

[rainbow]

However, in socialist countries - those with the State owning and/or controlling the means of production by and large, what is equality like there? Was there greater "equality" in communist Soviet Union? Communist Cuba? Socialist Venezuela? Is that "equality?"

Only a complete twat would believe that your examples of State Capitalism equate to Socialism.

By definition if a system allows elites to hold privileges not available to the masses then it isn't "Socialist".

...no matter what the systems may call themselves

Only a complete twat thinks Cuba, Venezuela or the Soviet Union weren't capitalist? LOL. Look, Venezuela was hailed a shining example of socialism, until it imploded.

Sez who?
You, not me.

...sez who? Michael Moore, Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, Owen Jones, Richard Burgon, Chris Williamson, Young Labour in general, the International Socialist Review http://www.isreview.org/issues/54/venezuela.shtml -- praising the awesome achievements of Venezuela under socialism...

... so you agree with them?

[Forty Two]

I love this "who said" Venezuela was a shining example of socialism.... how soon people forget the Chavez mania. The leftists loved Venezuela.

The list of Western leftists who once sang the Venezuelan government's praises is long, and Naomi Klein figures near the top.

In 2004, she signed a petition headlined, "We would vote for Hugo Chavez." Three years later, she lauded Venezuela as a place where "citizens had renewed their faith in the power of democracy to improve their lives." In her 2007 book, "The Shock Doctrine," she portrayed capitalism as a sort of global conspiracy that instigates financial crises and exploits poor countries in the wake of natural disasters. But Klein declared that Venezuela had been rendered immune to the "shocks" administered by free market fundamentalists thanks to Chavez's "21st Century Socialism," which had created "a zone of relative economic calm and predictability."

Chavez's untimely death from cancer in 2013 saw an outpouring of grief from the global left. The caudillo "demonstrated that it is possible to resist the neo-liberal dogma that holds sway over much of humanity," wrote British journalist Owen Jones. "I mourn a great hero to the majority of his people," said Oliver Stone, who would go on to replace Chavez with Vladimir Putin as the object of his twisted affection.

On the Venezuelan regime's international propaganda channel, Telesur, American host Abby Martin — who used to ply her duplicitous trade at Russia Today — takes credulous viewers on Potemkin tours of supermarkets fully stocked with goods. It would be inaccurate to label the thoroughly unconvincing Martin, who combines the journalistic ethics of Walter Duranty with the charm of Ulrike Meinhof, a useful idiot. She's just an idiot.

Most of Chavismo's earlier adherents have maintained a conspicuous silence in the face of the Venezuelan calamity. Those who do speak up, rather than apologize for getting things so wrong, blame collapsing oil prices for the country's fate. Yet the decline in the value of petroleum has not led to rioting on the streets of Oslo. The tragedy of Venezuela is the predictable result of what happens when a strongman wages, in Chavez's own words, "economic war on the bourgeoisie owners," cracks down on media, prints money with reckless abandon and implements all manner of harebrained socialist schemes.

In the age of Trump, Brexit and a wider backlash against globalization, left-wing economic populists are enjoying a resurgence in mainstream credibility by railing against free trade and "neoliberals." This is a scandal. For in the form of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the world has a petri dish in which to judge the sort of policies endorsed by Jones, Klein, British Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, homegrown socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and countless other deluded utopians.

There, the ghastly failures of their ideas are playing out for everyone to see; a real-time rebuke, as if another were needed, to socialism. That these people are considered authorities on anything other than purchasing Birkenstocks, much less running a country, is absurd.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/l ... story.html

[Forty Two]

Only a complete twat would believe that your examples of State Capitalism equate to Socialism.

By definition if a system allows elites to hold privileges not available to the masses then it isn't "Socialist".

...no matter what the systems may call themselves

Only a complete twat thinks Cuba, Venezuela or the Soviet Union weren't capitalist? LOL. Look, Venezuela was hailed a shining example of socialism, until it imploded.

Sez who?
You, not me.

...sez who? Michael Moore, Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, Owen Jones, Richard Burgon, Chris Williamson, Young Labour in general, the International Socialist Review http://www.isreview.org/issues/54/venezuela.shtml -- praising the awesome achievements of Venezuela under socialism...

... so you agree with them?

About what?

[rainbow]

About what?

... being a shining example of socialism

[Forty Two]

About what?

... being a shining example of socialism

Oh, yes, I agree that Venezuela is an example of socialism. Socialism doesn't "shine," though, as you can't polish a turd.