- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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You don’t see any state run bread lines do you?
That’s because they’d rather you starve, but the mafia has soup lines waiting for you.
You don’t see any state run bread lines do you?
I remember getting extremely screamed at on Reddit when I posted “Bread Lines” and the picture of a line around the block at a grocery store on the eve of a hurricane.
Apparently, that’s not a “real” bread line because idfk free markets or some shit.
You don’t see any state run bread lines do you?
You do, they’re called food pantry lines, and they tend to be run by churches in my experience
There are still plenty of local government run food pantries too, since I have to spell this part out in crayon for some people…
If the food pantries are run by churches, then they are not state run, meaning you do not see state run food pantries.
I’m not American, but my uneducated ass believes America is basically a theocracy. The president has to pretend that he does everything in the name of god, you have to swear your official vows on the bible, every hotel has a bible, every child in school has to pray to the god-emperor every morning, your money says “in god we trust”, your churches are payed for by tax-evasion.
So then, what renains to be the difference between “state run” and “church run” benefits really?
Well let’s break your points down.
1: The president does not need to pretend everything is done in the name of god. One party does this to appeal to a religious base.
2: You do not need to swear into office on a bible, many have sworn in on nothing at all or other holy books.
3: Every hotel is provided a bible (and often a book of mormon) by that company. This is because the company many of these hotels are owned by is a mormon company. Many hotels do not have bibles in them now.
4: Children are not required to pray in the morning, unless you attend a religious school specifically. If you mean the pledge, that is also optional and not done in many schools.
5: In God We Trust is an odd case yes. It was added in the 1950’s to “combat socialism.”
6: Churches are not required to pay taxes because they are also charities that perform good acts for the poor. Other religions claim this benefit as well.
Trump is a religion here. His devout call themselves christian but its clearly distinct in both beliefs and rituals.
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Actually they all functionally do, just to varying extents. Good luck finding a President who has never mentioned God in any of their speeches.
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Technically correct, but those who choose Not A Bible are routinely targetted with bigoted smear campaigns, often death threats, many of them credible, actionable.
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I mean you just do admit that this happens, that’s how normalized religion is, the state doesn’t do anything and it just happens.
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Clearly you have no idea how widespread and common it is for parents to force their kids to do this, for teachers in more religious states to force the pledge. Actual rules on the book be damned, don’t follow the unwritten ones and you are a pariah.
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You again concede this is the case.
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Churches can perform charitable acts, but there is no requirement for this, many of them don’t, many of them either directly or indirectly donate money to political think tank/campaigns and call that ‘charity’, many of them explicitly endorse particular political candidates, despite that being illegal, because either no one reports the violation and/or nobody bothers to prosecute it.
See also: The entire megachurch/megapastor phenomenon in the US, which would be described as a massive cult in basically any other country.
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Because they are religious? You would be hard pressed to find politicians who do not appeal to a higher authority except in countries where religious freedoms are restricted.
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Targeted by smear campaigns from their political opponents who would have smear campaigns running anyways. Credible death threats is a different story and not the norm, politicians recieve death threats from wackos over everything they do.
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What would the state do? It’s a first amendment protected right. If you dislike this practice you can stay in hotels without bibles.
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Anecdotal evidence at best, maybe in the more religious areas of the country in the south this happens, but they are a minority.
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Good job realizing that.
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Yes megachurches do provide some charity to maintain their tax exempt status. There is no defined percentage of revenue you must spend to be a charity. This is a larger issue that affects secular charities as well.
You have really only argued one of your six points.
You seem to arguing the US is not literally an official theocracy.
I am arguing that religiosity in the US is significantly more pervasive, common and extreme than in any other developed country, and I don’t even need to argue this, all kinds of stats have borne this out in detail, for decades.
Almost half of the US believes that we are all living in ‘the end times’, that the Rapture will either happen in their lifetimes, or even very, very soon.
Thats almost half the US that literally exists in an apocalyptic death cult.
They wouldn’t call it that, but that is literally what it is. Most other Christians in most other parts of the world do not believe in this essentially uniquely American fan fiction version of Christianity… and most Americans don’t even know that, that everyone else thinks we are weird.
Its a huge reason why we also statistically abberantly don’t believe climate change is real or is caused by humans or should have something done about it.
Its also a huge reason that US Evangelicals, up untill extremely recently… basically uniformly support anything Israel does.
They largely hate Jews, but, they literally want to hasten the apocalpyse, to hit all the conditions that they ‘interpreted’ into their scenario for the preamble to the Rapture.
Good luck getting an atheist elected president in the US.
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So then, what renains to be the difference between “state run” and “church run” benefits really?
What kind of question is that? Churches are funded through donations rather than through taxes and they have no legal obligation to perform charity, so the difference is that they are not as reliable for people in need.
I agree with everything you’re saying. But I just wanted to mention that politicians are not actually required to swear in on a Bible. That’s just what most use because of everything else you said. But every once in a while a politician will choose something different to swear on. Two I can remember of the to of my head was swearing in on Dr seues green eggs and ham and another one that swore in on a Captain America comic. Of course the religious nut jobs always lose it when that happens though
If the food pantries are run by churches, then they are not state run
What if the state is subsidizing the church through tax credits, grants, and subsidies?
The state has no control over the food at the pantries beyond basic health standards. The state cannot force me to give out bread when I run a soup kitchen. It can encourage me to continue with charitable acts with tax credits and subsidies, but it cannot force me to.
The state has no control over the food at the pantries beyond
My brother in Christ there is literally a department of agriculture at the federal level and every single state. To say the state has no control over food in pantries you have to ignore water rights and farm tax credits and crop subsidies and trade restrictions and registration in pesticides and that’s just on the production end.
I live in a city where people are routinely arrested for distributing food to the homeless.
The state clearly has enormous control over what gets produced, where it is distributed, and who eats it. Even what price its sold.
TIL “tend to” means “always”
Even if they tend to be run by churches, then they wouldn’t count as state run. Meaning you do not see state-run bread lines / food pantries.
23 downvotes
People in the West absolutely can’t stand when you point out all the same instructions of poverty exist on their home turf.
It’s a sin to acknowledge poverty exists. Nevermind to suggest that westerners might be worse at alleviating it than their foreign peers.
Your teachers handed your tests back face-down didnt they?
The reason of the confusion is clear.
The US propaganda has always equated Communism and totalitarianism.
It is bonkers that people in the USA cannot distinguish between an economic system and a political system.
Those two are distinct things. True communism is very democratic. But reading the Communist manifesto is heretic in the US and you are left with what your leaders tell you.
The Russian Revolution was communist but the USSR was never communist.
Right wing totalitarian dictators also use starvation of their own people as means of control.
What you are experiencing in the US is totalitarianism and while it hasn’t gotten to USSR levels, it is going on that direction.
Food for thought: study the political system in China, you’d be surprised how it’s actually more democratic than the current USA. Yes, the CCP controls the nominations. Now, tell me if there is true plurality in the US, two right wing parties selecting their candidates without any real popular input.
Really you’ve been bamboozled to think there is real democracy in the US.
True communism is very democratic.
At some point, you have to get passed “true whatever” and accept certain institutions already exist.
Also helps to recognize that communism as a movement has been anti-colonialist first and democratic only as it serves the former cause. Communists aren’t receptive to a liberal democracy that allows half the people to sell out the other half.
Folks love to get lost in the sauce talking about what Marxism really truly means, as an ideology, without asking why people adopt it or how they apply it in practice.
The Russian Revolution was communist but the USSR was never communist.
Yes. But what does that mean? If I have a recipe for potion of immortality, but anyone that drinks the resulting potion dies instead, it’s a bad recipe. It doesn’t matter its promise of immortality sounds good.
Communism makes good promises. However, every time you have a communist revolution, it ends up being authoritarian instead. What does that say about the communist political system?
Every time a capitalist system is implemented the oligarchy grows and seizes power and some corrupt oligarchs usurp the power of the people. What does that say about capitalism? I think your generalized question is terribly bad faithed when every can point out the US system and straight capitalism is a failure also. Rather then generalized ideas and theory we look at all the systems and see what does work and how we can keep the power in the hands of people
I think the issue is corruption, power, and control. To have a capitalist society you must allow businesses do what they want or they will seize power. In a communist society power is centralized when it is focused on the state as a communistic in which power and control when questioned or control loosened gets cracked down.
Democratic Republicans are great but there is a few problems when they move so slow. One, what if the charter is never fixed when we add more rights. We just tack it on as precedent and never amend the charter.
Second,if the population is growing is it still representing people properly. I think having a representative for every 1 million people is to huge. And the fact we have disparities as large as 1 to million but then some have as low as 1 in 250k. Is unequal.
Third. I don’t think as long as businesses hold power over an individuals life businesses should have political power. They hold to much currently. Also the fact through a business they can unlimitedly donate money but i as an individual can only spend $2,500(somewhere around there is the campaign cap)on a candidate is insane power wise.
Fourth a mixed economic/ business system would be wonderful a more planned economy by what citizens need would be nice. Also economy and business shouldn’t be running the country. The individual people should.
Fifth States are stupid unless they can leave. The lines/borders are arbitrarily stupid and the fact the power federal is based on the lines fucks us up. If so chooses states should be able to break apart and make local states of the people so it is easier to have democratic control over your local area. Yes this means almost every state would become major cities and then the rural areas. Unless they want to partner with a city.
I don’t see how what you write relates to what I write other than what-aboutism directing attention to (non-fatal) issues of capitalism instead of addressing the fatal issues of communism.
non-fatal
…
Do I have to remind you that capitalistic democracies other than USA exist? Plenty of them work decently well. Certainly still far from perfect, but well enough to prove these issues can be overcome, and are therefore non-fatal.
…Dude, the planet is frying.
“everyone is an American”
Ill be the patsy: You can’t make rules to eliminate human greed / lust for power?
I’m very simplistic with this stuff and haven’t studied it, but that seems to be the fundamental limitation with communism. Would work great with robots but we’re more ‘complex’ with our subconscious bias, unexamined motives and insecurities driving our actions.
Even if “greed is human nature” weren’t complete bullshit, the best economic system is definitely not the one that most aggressively incentivizes greed
I think it says more about how Lemmings and other westerners understand authoritarianism. Because capitalist countries are way more authoritarian than any communist country has ever been. Y’all have just been fed lie after lie until you start repeating them yourselves.
More like you have a simple and easy to follow recipe for cake. You and a friend are following it dutifully. Just before the last step of the recipe your friend gets a call from their partner. Your friend then pushes you out of the kitchen and locks you out. The cake is served frosted in your friends freshly cut hair clippings.
Call me naive if you want but I think we might want to aim for slightly more than another flavor of illusory democracy.
Although I have to say that the primary selection process in the US, while deeply flawed, is far more open for insurgent candidates than the Chinese system. See Mamdani for a recent example of how democratic elites don’t have total control of the outcomes.
The USSR never intentionally starved its citizens as the US is doing right now.
Downvote if you believe CIA/fascist propaganda.
At this point, this joke is basically like kicking a dead horse.
Keep going an let’s make MAGA glue
Umazing
deleted by creator
The largest demographic group receiving SNAP benefits is white people, at 37%, so (tries to do math like a racist) 63% assorted brown people!
But what really sells it to the 37% of white people in mostly red states with poor public education are things like this article about some super genius trolling where the first 3 groups alone add up to like 124%. I expect that the 17% of people who do not report ethnic demographics are largely white in the first place, and have been gaslit for so long that they won’t report out of fear of being some sort of “race traitor” or some other stupid racist BS thing that idiots do.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2282378855532810
Sorry for a facebook link, couldn’t find another.
Also, in a famine, it is grossly unfair to put all blame on a single leader/government. In USSR’s case, during global famine, the US insisted debt be paid in food, and the government had to react to extortionist farmer class (Kulak) pricing. It is entirely political to create narrative of opponents fault for everything, when they are faced with hard decisions that your country imposed on them.
In this case, it is especially eggregious to not only force starvation by executive decision in times of relative abundance, but to further provide IRS directives that would collect less (minimum corporate tax rules) from oligarchs, so that budget/revenue is further reduced, and excuse to continue starving people becomes a manufactured crisis.
I cannot find a single source about US insisting debt payments be made in food. Most of the kulaks were also imprisoned or deported in the late 1920’s during collectivization. The USSR in the early years had targeted food shortages in Ukraine and the Caucuses to starve the population into submission. There was later a union wide food shortage because Stalin increased the export of wheat without adequately increasing production.
Also Stalin’s promotion of Trofim Lysenko and his crackpot ideas on agriculture that mirrored the crackpot ideas of Leninism. Exacerbating famines and helping to kill millions.
The wikipedia article (holomodor), unless it’s been nazi washed recently, has/had all the points I made even if it’s balanced to “always hate Stalin”. I don’t know what caused Stalin to not repay US debt (explains food exports), but that too would have led to complaints about his handling of famine. Holomodor is a Ukrainian word, and its enthusiastic eastern cooperation with nazi Germany, including administrating extermination camps, colours its history/politics to this day. Still, they had fewer famine deaths than other parts of the USSR.
Recently, famine/drought in Syria was a great opportunity for the empire and its Al Quaeda and ISIS proxies to rise up and eventually overthrow the long time leader. It is not in demonic evil scum’s nature to assist people’s survival through cooperation with their government, if a narrative gives them more control over the world.
We’ve had communism for the wealthy as long as I can remember
To be fair, a lot of communist revolution did result in mass starvation.
As a precursor, sure. The OG 1918 October Revolution was fueled by a string of famines, exacerbated by the World War.
The American Bonus Marchers of 1932 were also propelled by food shortages of The Dust Bowl.
But these events get vanishingly little coverage in western history textbooks
Which communist revolution? Russia was having famines before the soviet revolution. Its more reasonable to say communism solved the famines in russia and created them in china.
Eh the Soviets had plenty of their own man made famine (Holodomor, among others)
I wouldn’t associate that with a revolution though. Similar to how the “Irish potato famine” was something the brits did to Ireland that’s a thing the soviets did to their colonies, essentially and I would probably chalk it up to a type of colonialism
Not exactly, no, you see what both the USSR and the CCP did was decentralize agricultural planning under the assumption that farmers would still grow enough food to feed everyone even if they weren’t remunerated, resulting in tens of millions of deaths.
What the USA is doing is producing the food but not remunerating it. The end results might be the same but that is yet to be seen.
“Let them eat Soybeans.”
Your phrasing implies that the issue was that farmers all sat about at home not working because they weren’t getting paid. There were plenty of problems, but I’ve seen scant evidence that that the threat of getting fired for not doing your job was even in the top three.
My phrasing implies the USSR and CCP were administrated by a bunch of dumb assholes who are now wading through corpses in hell.
For you to come to any other conclusion is insane.
In my country, one evil of communism I always heard was “not being able to buy Adidas shoes and Levis jeans”. But if capitalism makes it a de facto luxury product through devaluing your work, then it’s tough luck.
But it’s their fault for being poor. - Republicans
As a note, communism involves some ideas that are impossible or nearly so.
Imagine a society in which every person has exactly the same sociopolitical power as every other person; representatives and officials do not have additional power; that’s a property of a truly communist society. We don’t believe that can be done IRL.
Imagine a society in which everyone’s needs are met for an extreme body of needs (say as defined by the UN Universal Declaration of Human RIghts). The only transients that exist either are in a short line to be issued a dwelling, or don’t want one. Everyone is fed. Everyone has their own stuff. This isn’t impossible, but is difficult as heck to reach.
Communism is a goal that a society tries to reach similar to a zero homicide rate We don’t expect to get there, but we do want our society to ever get closer, as we discover new means to approach that limit.
We reach for the ideal of a communist society. We never expect to actually get there.
No no NO! It’s only starvation when the russians do it.
However when the orange kiddie fiddling reality TV ‘star’ failed businessman convicted criminal/rapist forces it on to his people then it is called sparkling mandatory dieting.With a centrally controlled food supply, a misstep can lead to there literally not being enough food. You know this is different and this post is disingenuous.
More people die from obesity than starvation. There are tons of options for free food. Nobody is going to starve to death.
tankie gonna say it was due to mismanagement or some shit like that
Not to be a tankie or a lib or a capitalists, but sometimes famines do happen, in the USSR was mostly due to one shitty botanist who played the politics game, we SHOULD learn from those mistakes, sometimes it is because natural or unexpected consequences. Like I wonder if there were biologists in China saying that killing the sparrows would cause a famine. But capitalists famines are such an different beast. They are always obviously preventable but doing so would decrease someone’s profits. The Irish famine was a straight up genocide, dust bowl was rich people recklessly gambling with the nation, and this one? straight up billionaires shoving the nation’s wealth into their pockets, like before but even more mercilessly.
Lysenko the shitty botanist happened a bit later and his ideas had repercussions way into 1970s. Lysenko was still on the come-up back in early 1930s but he really started getting political weight a bit later in 1935-36 when the purges happened and his bullshit started really messing things up after WW2 into the 1950s.
Meanwhile, Holodomor was way more diabolical and spiteful act. Ever since the soviets took over Ukraine - they had paranoia about nationalist uprising taking them out. For a while, a workable solution was to provide national representation. The whole Ukrainization policy. Eventually, their own policy got them scared so much they started the russification policy to undo “the damage”. They started taking out various Ukrainian political and cultural figures under false allegations.
At the same time shambolic economic reforms and collectivization attempts led to people questioning government competence and demand proper political representation instead of whatever soviets tried to do. The government solution was to call business owners and rich upper class peasants the enemy and go full feudal - purge the politically active people (call it the continuing class struggle) and turn peasants into collectivized serfs under kolkhoz system with no representation or rights. They couldn’t even travel without their superior permission and had no documents. And to seal the deal - start village blockades - attrition into submission and assimilation.
thanks, forgot about Holodomor, you make good points.
the most horrifying thing is that during that period soviets also proceeded to wipe out almost the entire Ukrainian intellectual elite under various false pretenses. One generation gone - just like that.
The most egregious example was The SVU trial (translates as Union for the Freedom of Ukraine trial) - a completely made up case with mock trial drummed up by the media - it was meant to take out folks who seemed out of line with “nationalist” tendencies threatening the state integrity in some nebulous way.
Umm ackshuslly it’s because of america! Because, ummm, sanctions. Without American trade, the economy crumbled. The soviet union was a victim of economic terrorism!
Adam Curtis’ Pandora’s Box series has a funny bit about Aleksei Gastev and his scientific management theories - dude wasn’t even political, he just liked figuring out how to get shit done efficiently. His ideas were essentially what is today known as innovation-driven project management - so naturally he was gulaged and commie cronies used feudalism instead.
lmao please make this the new meme format
