• @masquenox
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    16 months ago

    Javier Milei is a leftist

    Right-wingers don’t threaten the status quo - they enforce it. Milei is a capitalist - and he is making capitalists inside and outside Argentina very happy. So how is he leftist, again?

    wt:socialism#English

    Here’s your problem…

    political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership

    …those are already two violently incompatible forms of ownership, a fact the people writing these kind of definitions constantly gloss over. And that’s just the start… these pop definitions only become less and less useful from there on in.

    As a purely propagandistic buzzword, socialism served the same purpose in the USSR as the term “democracy” serves in the west - an empty word, with accompanying empty definitions, that purely exists to justify the power and privilege of the people at the top. The majority of the “definitions” you posted can be classified as this.

    Your definition of socialism is so general as to be a bit vague.

    No. It isn’t. Political ideology doesn’t get less vague than this. It’s very, very easy to see if the working-class actually controls anything in any given society - this is why the Bolsheviks and their descendents scrambled to make sure the term socialism means “whatever we want it to mean.”

    But they don’t get to change the basic idea behind it.

    Christ wasn’t being a socialist as much as philanthropic.

    Christ was never philanthropic - he wasn’t some capitalist laundering his public image, and he never separated himself from the class of people he was born into. What Christ was doing is more accurately described as mutual aid.

    this might be the case of any POC billionaire

    You’d be surprised how many non-white people embrace the hierarchies that enable and require white supremacism while pretending to reject it - just look at people like Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas.

    • DMBFFF
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      6 months ago

      So how is he leftist, again?

      from an Argentine view (if not quite a Latin American or world POV)

      a fact the people writing these kind of definitions constantly gloss over. And that’s just the start… these pop definitions only become less and less useful from there on in.

      Yes, and many on the far right and far left don’t like Wikipedia, and presumably wouldn’t its sister Wiktionary, but I tend to defer to the authority of WMF projects more than to those I know even less about.

      As a purely propagandistic buzzword, socialism served the same purpose in the USSR as the term “democracy” serves in the west - an empty word, with accompanying empty definitions, that purely exists to justify the power and privilege of the people at the top. The majority of the “definitions” you posted can be classified as this.

      I suppose they might say something like that they got things done.

      Russia in 1916 was a dying empire with much suffering, while in, say, 1978, all, or nearly all, Russians, and others in the USSR, were fed, clothed, housed, medically cared for, educated, and had higher life expediencies. Ditto China. Ditto Cuba. Ditto Yugoslavia. Maybe even ditto Albania and North Korea. As for Cambodia, Chomsky says it wasn’t 2 million, and they lasted only a few years. What if the Khmer Rouge lasted, say, 20 years? How would Cambodia be in, say, 1996? It’s been run for over 40 years by one who was in the Khmer Rouge.

      Meanwhile Western bourgeois supposed-leftists spend much time arguing or doing ineffective things.

      Noam Chomsky and Fidel Castro were both born around the same time.

      Who has accomplished more for leftism and socialism?

      But they don’t get to change the basic idea behind it.

      Whatever, Western bourgeois pseudo-anon individualist: the USSR and PRC did great things, while you still live in a shitty capitalist empire. 😁🙂

      Christ was never philanthropic - he wasn’t some capitalist laundering his public image, and he never separated himself from the class of people he was born into. What Christ was doing is more accurately described as mutual aid.

      wt:philanthropy#English

      Noun

      philanthropy (countable and uncountable, plural philanthropies)

      1a. (chiefly uncountable) Benevolent altruism with the intention of increasing the well-being of humankind.

      2b. (uncountable) Charitable giving, charity.

      He was supposedly God incarnate performing a miracle.

      What he did, no one could do, i.e. feed to their fill 5000 people with only 5 loaves and 2 fish, with 12 baskets of leftovers.

      Again, your analogy is a poor one: it doesn’t prove Jesus was a leftist or socialist.

      We also don’t know what he did in his later teens or 20s.

      Presumably the people he hung out with most were his disciples who saw him as divine.

      You’d be surprised how many non-white people embrace the hierarchies that enable and require white supremacism while pretending to reject it - just look at people like Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas.

      True, but I don’t think billionaire Winfrey would endorse either.