I can’t really think of a reason for that as Reddit is hated somewhat equally by “both” sides of the spectrum. It’s just something I find interesting.
I can’t really think of a reason for that as Reddit is hated somewhat equally by “both” sides of the spectrum. It’s just something I find interesting.
Hot take: you shouldn’t subscribe to an ism.
You know what my political affiliation is? I’m an engineer. You want to solve a problem, you break it apart and fix the broken parts.
Abortion? Sure.
What’s the problem? Women are pregnant and they don’t wanna be.
Well how’d they get pregnant? They had unprotected sex, or they got raped(including all kinds here). Teach people how to use birth control and make it easy to get. Teach men about consent. Fund sex crime policing.
That takes care of the input side of the equation. What’s next? Oh yeah, they don’t wanna be pregnant. Why not? Because it could kill them, or wreck thier bodies. OK, well let’s fund research and support for maternal mortality issues (including post-partum). If a pregnancy is likely to kill a woman (like double the normal mortality rate) she should be allowed to abort, even if she’s not in immediate danger. You can’t force somebody to risk their life.
Any other reasons? Because the fetus is severely deformed and will die in pain if allowed to make it to full term? Abortion, no question. Honestly any other position on this one is fucked up. I’m sure of very little when it comes to God, but I’m sure it doesn’t want preventable suffering.
What else? Families can’t afford a kid? Free high quality childcare for everyone. Free healthcare for kids and post-partum mothers (probably for everyone but that’s a different topic).
What about adoption? Well, as they say, adoption is the answer to a different question. Just to cover all cases though, let’s fund high-quality adoption services, including counseling for the birth mother for as long as she needs.
How do we pay for it all? Taxes. Taxes are good for society. Shut the fuck up and pony up your fair share. If you use our stuff, eat our food, drink our clean water, taxes are what you owe.
These are just off the top of my head. The real answers are probably way more complicated, but it’s going to take work to figure it all out. This is how you fix a problem though. Lots of hard work to understand the whole thing, soup to nuts, and then you fix it all.
Does that make me a leftist?
You just described steps that would actually reduce abortion by quite a lot, without making it illegal at all. The sex ed and contraception stuff is basically exactly how it’s done in other western countries that don’t have nearly the issue with teen pregnancies we do. What you’re proposing is practical and effective.
And in the eyes of the MAGA crowd, you’re not just a leftist, you’re a baby-murdering, Satan-worshipping communist America-hater.
I’m European. Do you think the American teens getting pregnant are actually surprised? That just seems inconceivable (pun not intended) to me.
Without comprehensive sex ed? Yeah. I think they are. A lot of them believe myths about getting pregnant, and no one - either at school or in their religiously restrictive homes - will tell them the truth. So they find out the hard way.
You are detailing exactly what would reduce abortion. Republicans/conservatives would probably call you a socialist (while meaning it negatively) and say that you are encouraging teens to have sex by offering contraceptives and encouraging people to be lazy by offering free child care. These are the things that would really help. It feels to me like they don’t care about actually helping, just punishing people and creating wedge issues.
There’s nothing wrong with what you’re saying on a vacuum. The problem is deciding what is actually a problem, and once it’s been decided, which one solution out of many possible ones we’re actually going to pick.
Is unequality a problem? If it is, up to which degree? Is it a problem that the richest person has four times as much wealth as the poorest person? Is it a problem that the richest person has x100000 times as much wealth as the poorest person? Are we going to solve that through redistribution? Through better public, accessible education? By empowering worker unions? By socializing the means of production in order to prevent capital accumulation?
Once you’re perfectly aware of what values you’re defending, you can find the most efficient way to let society advance forward according to them. But since not everyone shares the same values, even if everyone was perfectly rational and had access to all information, different people would still defend different solutions. Of course, people’s values evolve all the time and everyone is irrational up to some degree, even if we put effort into perfecting our epistemology and use the scientific method to approach as many issues as possibles (which we should nonetheless do), so even that ideal state of things is very, very far away.
Apply the scientifc method. Look at places and times with wide economic disparity. Were/are those good stable places with happy healthy populations, or was it bad. If you decide it’s a problem based on evidence, then look at solutions. If you don’t have examples, try things out and record the data. What worked and what didn’t. Don’t let your values bias you. I think that welath inequality is a problem, but I’m willing to listen to thoroughly researched, peer reviewed, data backed conclusions.
You have two distributions of populations:
Distribution A has 50% of the population scoring 10 happiness, and the remaining 50% scoring 0.
Distribution B has 100% of the population scoring 5 happiness.
Your research has shown that these two distributions are the two options that allow for maximization of happiness, and you can achieve any of them at the same cost with exactly the same externalities. This data is confirmed with perfect mathematical precision to a point currently unavailable to our scientific institutions for the sake of this thought experiment.
There is no objective reason to choose one over the other; if none is chosen, a suboptimal distribution will be chosen for you.
I find that often once both sides have decided that there is a problem and it should be solved but start arguing about mutually exclusive solutions to that issue, one of the sides (and it does switch) is focusing on addressing the output of the problem and the other is focusing on addressing the cause of the problem!
“Ow, my foot hurts!”
Side A: “let’s give you some painkillers to stop the pain” Side B: “forget about the painkillers, stop standing on their feet!” Side A: “I’ve already stood on their foot, there’s nothing I can do to undo it. Do you want me to rewind time or something? Why don’t you care about treating their pain‽” Side B: “If you keep standing on their feet they’re going to stay in pain no matter what!” Side A: “how can I get this person painkillers for their pain without standing here? Why are you so blind to this person’s suffering‽”
Etc etc forever while we achieve nothing and let everything turn to rust and ashes to the backdrop of everyone silently screaming inside of their heads.
Not sure I agree that an engineering mindset wouldn’t be an improvement on that tbh. There really aren’t normally multiple equally valid solutions to big problems. Just people with a more or less complete understanding of the issue arguing that their understanding and subsequent solution is the best rather that just fucking listening and thinking competently to arrive at the right answers together.
Problem solving should be every politician’s goal. The only difference is what “problems” they are trying to solve. That’s what separates left and right, the problems. And frankly, they are radically different problems to the same situations.
Yes. That makes you a leftist. Center-leftist, but in this political climate…good enough.
That doesn’t make you a leftist at all lol
First, left and right are relative terms. We are currently in a fight for survival. If you want to die on the hill of your purity test, you’re welcome to. I’ll collect allies, people who may have the right values but incomplete information, and do what I can, and we’ll see which approach is more effective for the people, the workers.
I am the people you’re talking about. I am not a leftist. I like capitalism and single payer healthcare. The government is just better at doing some things. I like mailmen too.
Sounds like you’re just scared of the term leftist and what you believe it would imply about you.
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I’m not afraid of people who are wrong. I just know they’re wrong.
Leftists, flat-earthers, Young Earth Creationists, none of them scare me.
Would you mind clarifying your standpoint on what should be done in case a woman is raped and becomes pregnant? You kind of glossed over that part of it. I understand that you want to prevent the number of pregnancies due to rape, but what exactly do you propose when that happens? Same for pregnancies due to incest.
It seems you already know most of what will actually help this issue, and it does include social programs. Does this make you a leftist? No, it makes you a realist. That is, unless you ask this question to most conservatives who will instantly label you as one. How dare you actually suggest something progressive!
A person’s body is their own. From the skin in, it’s yours to do with as you please. You can’t make somebody wreck their body or risk their lives to satisfy your morality. I’m willing to debate this issue with someone who has done everything I’m their power to mitigate the risk of unwanted pregnancy. If not, I assume they’re just trying to control women’s bodies in order to secure their place in heaven, because the rest of christianity is hard.
Reality has a left-wing bias.
In that case, as well as the medical one, abortion counts as self-defence.
Now you might be saying “but the baby isn’t at fault, self-defence is only valid against the assailant” but, well:
Assume you and some other guy are kidnapped by a psychopath, who puts you two into a contraption that forces the both of you to either kill the other to survive, or both die after say half a day. Is morally and legally justified to kill that random stranger who did you no wrong to save your own life?
See it’s much easier in that case where the stakes are higher and, yes, in any (sane) legal system self-defence is valid also against people who did you no wrong: You do not have to tolerate suffering an (any) injustice just because the assailant is being creative. If you want to convict someone of homicide in that case how about the rapist.
Lol you just glaringly leave off the option of having an abortion for a woman who just plain old doesn’t want to have a kid. If she just doesn’t want to have a kid (no medical issue going on for either the mother or fetus), and it’s been say, 3 months since inception, can she have an abortion? You seem to really only be mentioning abortion when it comes to threatening the life of the mother or if the fetus is deformed. What about just a purely elective abortion, less than 12 weeks let’s say? Would you want to see that illegal?
Edit: Nevermind, read your response below to a similar question.
She doesn’t want to be pregnant or she doesn’t want to have a kid? Two different problems with two different solutions.
I think we should prevent as many abortions as we can, while preserving everyone’s right to body autonomy.
How did your hypothetical woman get pregnant? In my hypothetical, ideal world that scenario should be exceedingly rare.
What is your answer to a scenario in which a woman using birth control properly in a loving monogamous relationship becomes pregnant when neither party wants a child? The most common form of birth control (the pill), when taken properly only has a 97% effective rate. Pair that with a second form of birth control (i.e. the pullout method) and it will go up but it will never be 100% effective.
And she doesn’t want to put the child up for adoption? That’s valid. Pregnancy has long term negative health impacts. Morally, I’m not opposed to abortion. I know some people are. I feel like I’m unwilling to debate the morality while all the practical steps to mitigate the risk haven’t been taken.
I would add, free, easily accessible sterilization should be the norm. I don’t want more kids, so I got sterilized.
That might actually be a very very good strategy in US politics. The “we can talk morality when you stopped being a bigot and support sex ed and child welfare” kind of line. Put the rabid conservatives on the moral defensive.
You missed one thing: Some women just want to abort regardless, and also have all through history, including prehistory. All those policies you listed there are in place in Germany as the constitutional court ruled that the state has a duty to protect life (also the unborn) and thus has to take steps to minimise the number of abortions, and social means are to be preferred over prison sentences because a) more effective and b) proportionality, but: You don’t catch every case with those social means.
Now, if you penalise abortions that fall through those cracks you get backstreet abortions – which you have no control over. You can’t convince people at the last moment, you can’t drown them in flyers explaining all the social services they’re going to receive and smother them with support. That’s why at-will abortion in Germany is decriminalised if you’re willing to sit through what’s called pregnancy conflict counselling, there’s no notes taken or result given in those you get a piece of paper that says that you were there, then there’s a three-day cooldown and you can bring the notice to a doctor who now can perform the abortion legally. If you’re poor, the state is going to cover the costs (not your health insurance because pregnancy is not an illness).
In a nutshell: For the state to be maximally effective at minimising the number of abortions it has to tolerate abortions being carried out legally, and even pay for them to be performed.
And this, btw, to many an American’s surprise, comes from a rather firm “human dignity starts with insemination, the right to live starts with nidation as that’s when nature decides to bring a particular life to fruit” type of doctrine. (The human dignity stuff comes into play e.g. during preimplantation diagnostics: You can be tossed out of the pool for carrying a genetic disease, but not for your sex, hair colour, or whatnot).
We shall call in Huckleberryism. Subscribed!
Don’t tell me what to do.
They don’t care if you’re a leftist or not, they care that you’re telling them what to do, precisely because they don’t want to be told what to do, even if it’s good for them, because if they’re being told what to do, it means they aren’t in power, and they want power at any cost. In the pursuit of the ‘right’ people telling the ‘wrong’ people what to do, and in the pursuit of keeping the ‘wrong’ people from telling the ‘right’ people what to do, anything goes. Hypocrisy, lies, crime, election fraud, subverting courts, coups, false patriotism, false piety, terrorism, even outright murder… anything goes.
Know the enemy, spread the word to your friends and family (and maybe further).
I like your thinking.
I think unwanted children are the worst. lets put aside that the family won’t be happy. It’s these children that will cause trouble, populate prisons. They’ll be an absolute drag on society. It’s not even they’re fault. Growing up without love is tough
Though I assume this is but one part of your political convictions, I would say yes. That being said I think your hot take is wrong and suggest thinking about it this way: Theory and applications are two incredibly important components of any discipline, ranging from mathematics to politics. In this case the theoretical part means more or less ideology (or the isms you refer to) while applications are the more pragmatic approach of thinking implementations and effects. Both are important to navigate and propose solutions to ever evolving problems in our societies.
Now, as to why this makes you more left is that the leftist parties are usually (but not always) more culturally progressive as opposed to being conservative/reactionary when faced with questions like gay marriage, abortion etc… I think the most coherent political view is that of being both culturally and economically leftist, though that is of course subject to debate. If you are both I think you should say you are leftist as well.
This is a big part of the problem tbh, left-right is the economic distinction, authoritarian or libertarian is the top to bottom axis which is more apt to apply to “culture.”
If you want to control people through force of government you’re on the authoritarian side, if you want people to be free to live their lives so long as they don’t actively harm others you’re on the libertarian side. If you prefer collectivist economics you’re on the left side, and if you prefer capitalism in some form you’re on the right side. Put those together to get a slightly more accurate picture of a person you’re interacting with.
So a guy who prefers individualist free market economy and is socially apathetic or progressive would be bottom right, a guy who prefers more market control but still capitalism and is socially conservative would be center right, a guy who prefers monarchy with much market control and very conservative socially is top right, stalinists would be top left as they’re authoritarian and not necessarily progressive and collectivist as all hell, liberals would be center left more progressive but still authoritarian and still collectivists, and left libertarians would be bottom left, collectivist and progressive but as long as you aren’t hurting people live and let live, like bottom right. Of course most people fall somewhere on the middle of the graph or their quadrant rather than in a corner of it, but it is still more helpful than only having one axis to base things on.
Well, this “political compass” you are referring to does have some merits, but any effort to reduce political stances into scales is of course a simplification. For that sake one could argue that adding arbitrary more dimensions to the representation makes it more accurate, but I think that ultimately defeats the purpose of the simplification. There is no canonical way to express these concepts, hence it depends on context which simplification (if any) is useful.
One particular issue I see with auth-lib is that it IMO has a bias in that most only consider the government as an authority in this setting. However if one say defines autority as
it should be clear that under some economical systems there are definitely authorities besides the state. Personally I would argue that money translates to power and hence authority. If this power is unchecked and of great importance, which I think it largely is, I would also argue that it forms a basis of authoritarian rule.
I see money as more a necessary thing, as it is much easier to operate a society that way over no money. You could replace money with barter but that does complicate things.
I think you might have misunderstood the point I was making. What I implied was that for a society to be free from authoritarianism and under democratic control, there also has to be some limits to the power wielded by the rich. Of course one could try to limit the power of money, but I think the most important thing one should do is limit the mechanics of the economy that allow for unlimited accumulation of wealth (i.e. read taxes and worker collectives).
Well good luck with that. Anyone been convicted in connection with that whole Epstein Fiasco? Hell at least sometimes rich guys do get fucked like Madoff but not one government employee has had to answer for their involvement with Epstein, they won’t even release the log.
The wealth in essence isn’t the issue, one can be wealthy and a good person, it is theoretically possible, I’d be hard pressed to think of an example while I’m shitting rn but nonetheless it is something that can happen. The issue comes in with letting those people get away with crimes because of their wealth, if we just stopped doing that your issue would be solved.
Problem is, both of these things are equally likely to occur, which is to say not very. The ruling elite consists of both the government and the corporations propped up by them, but even the most ardent revolutionaries on both sides of the economic spectrum only hate 1/2 of this ruling elite, nothing will ever be solved because neither side can see this. You’re more likely to come back to this with “yeah it’s both but it is really the corpos” than you are to actually see the issue is both.
Just to be on the same page I am not from the US. Also, I think the US government is essentially composed of and works for the bourgeoisie class, hence there is no distinction of my critique of the capitalists and the people in government due to them being the same groups.
Furthermore, this makes the Epstein case a further demonstration of the corrupting effects of money. I am really sorry for the state of the US democracy and where I am from we use it as a staple of what we don’t want our society to look like.
Lastly, there is an issue with hoarding wealth and being a good person. This is twofold: First there is the issue of where the money is taken from and second there is the issue of how it could be better spent. I think a good person would not overcharge for their products nor underpay their workers. However that is essentially how you get rich, along with other scummy actions. Lastly, after hoarding exorbitant amounts of wealth, I think a good person would also use this for something good rather than themselves.
You can have no money AND not barter. See: gift economy. People just giving each other stuff all the time.
What dimension do you live in? I’ve been looking for a new one to move to.
Even Donald Duck doesnt subscribe to the abortion ban
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You also just listed all the reasons that rape is allowed in most countries (rape, death risk, severe deformation, etc). You didn’t touch on the “abort for any reason at any time” issue which is the flagship of leftist movement
You are not a leftist, just a centrist living in the US
stAhp tUrLIng mE wAt tUr dOO!
Reforms are great, but ultimately a doomed bandaid over real problems. Quoth Lenin:
"Reformism is bourgeois deception of the workers, who, despite individual improvements, will always remain wage-slaves, as long as there is the domination of capital.
The liberal bourgeoisie grant reforms with one hand, and with the other always take them back, reduce them to nought, use them to enslave the workers, to divide them into separate groups and perpetuate wage-slavery. For that reason reformism, even when quite sincere, in practice becomes a weapon by means of which the bourgeoisie corrupt and weaken the workers. The experience of all countries shows that the workers who put their trust in the reformists are always fooled.
And conversely, workers who have assimilated Marx’s theory, i.e., realised the inevitability of wage-slavery so long as capitalist rule remains, will not be fooled by any bourgeois reforms. Understanding that where capitalism continued to exist reforms cannot be either enduring or far-reaching, the workers fight for better conditions and use them to intensify the fight against wage-slavery. The reformists try to divide and deceive the workers, to divert them from the class struggle by petty concessions. But the workers, having seen through the falsity of reformism, utilise reforms to develop and broaden their class struggle."
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/sep/12b.htm
Nobody cares what Lenin had to say. You’re not just talking to the lemmygrad lot.
Lol, if I link you to an author you don’t recognize will you be able to engage with the argument? Let’s try: https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/ch05.htm
If you want to link me to an author I don’t recognise, you’ll have to try harder than Luxemburg!
Okay so you still failed to refute the argument at all. Do you realize you’re embarrassing yourself? Give me a counterpoint.
Karl Marx was an idiot. Let me explain…no there’s too much. Let me sum up. Replacing a whole system just because some parts of it don’t work is stupid. How do you know the system you put in as a replacement won’t also be broken.
Some people tried to replace capitalism with a totally different system and it went real bad real fast. This wasn’t an isolated incident. They tried it in a bunch of places and in none of them did it work. Marxism has been debunked in the field.
Marxism is the idea that you can fix problems with an ism. Got poor people? Try communism or socialism or half-cocked-ism. If your solution to a problem can fit on a bumper sticker it’s wrong.
If you think Karl Marx was an idiot (not just wrong, but an idiot), you don’t understand the conversation well enough to participate.
Why do Marxists always assume people who disagree just aren’t smart enough to understand Marxism? It’s not difficult to understand the concept, it’s just dumb. Marx was old school I-am-very-smart.
You’re an engineer. There are absolutely scenarios where so much of a system is broken that you have to redesign the whole system. You can’t turn a steam engine into an electric motor piece by piece.
40% of the population is one missed paycheck away from poverty while a handful of people have rocket ships and megayachts and buy-a-few-politicians money. That is not a bug, that is the central operating principle, the Carnot cycle of capitalism. If you’re one of the millions who are in the “wage labor” part of the cycle instead of the “extract profit” part of the cycle, capitalism has already gotten real bad.
You’re an engineer. Don’t be so reductionist. You sound like a kid who invented a perpetual motion machine with an overbalanced wheel and magnets. You should know better.
I can absolutely draw you a line from the development of the steam engine to the electric motor to NASA. Every little thing that was wrong with steam engines led to better and better technology. Marxism is like saying, “the steam engine has problems, obviously mechanical engineering is doomed, lets breed better horses.”
Really? Please, what linear, incremental changes can you make to a pressurized piston driven engine that will turn it gradually into an induction motor? Certainly, they both turn a wheel eventually, but the fundamental principle of operation is totally different. The things that were wrong with steam engines led to incremental improvements up until a point, when a total redesign was necessary.
Your analogical thinking needs improvement. Capitalism isn’t like mechanical engineering, it’s like external combustion. Socialism is like replacing it with internal combustion, communism is like replacing that with electric induction.
Steam engines literally led to the development of electric motors. Steam engines led to steam turbines which led to dynamos which led to electric motors, each invention building off the knowledge gained at the previous step.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_turbine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Algernon_Parsons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamo
Your analogy is doubly flawed. Each type of engine you mention has strengths and weaknesses that depend on external variables. Internal combustion isn’t better at producing electricity for instance, which is why we mostly use external combustion to do that. Electric motors aren’t better than internal combustion, except that internal combustion is causing climate change. It’s also flawed because history has shown that Socialism doesn’t work better than Capitalism. I could see, if this were purely theoretical, someone arguing the benefits of Marxist ideas, but it’s been tried. In several places around the world, people tried to put in place the kind of changes you’re advocating. In every case it led to authoritarianism, brutal repression, and starvation. Does it suck that poor kids don’t have enough to eat, while Bezos builds space yachts? Yeah it sucks, but it’s not millions-starving-to-death levels of suck like we actually, not theoretically, got every time we tried Communism or Socialism or any kind of take-their-stuff-and-give-it-to-me-ism.
Right, but you wanna keep using steam engines to power cars.
History shows that capitalism has one exemplary use case: siphoning value from workers to capitalists. Full stop. It’s an outright failure at other things, or at least worse than most alternatives.
There are, in fact, millions starving to death under capitalism, and have been every time it’s been tried. Sure, they’re brown people in countries capitalists call “shit holes” so you personally can’t see them, but they’re there. Lots of them are working in dangerous conditions for negligible wages in order to prop up capitalism, because capitalism boils down to one equation:
(Revenue) - (Expenses) = Profit
Guess where wages fall in that equation?
Poverty and exploitation aren’t coincidental, occasional consequences of capitalism. They are the mathematically inevitable conclusion every single time. It’s almost impossible to find a mass-market product that didn’t involve child or slave (or child slave) labor somewhere in the supply chain. After all, the fewer pennies you pay for labor, the more space yachts you can buy.
The only times capitalist economies do anything other than exploit and cause poverty are when armed revolt is imminent and the government steps in to take-the-capitalists’-stuff-and-give-it-to-everyone.
Social democratic economies are thriving around the world. Every unregulated capitalist economy has devolved into space yachts and starving millions almost immediately.
Sure, there have been authoritarian governments that said they were socialist for PR. You can call a hammer a socket wrench. The failure of the hammer to turn a nut doesn’t mean socket wrenches don’t work, it means you’re pretending a hammer is something it isn’t. No one has tried communism, or large scale socialism. They’ve tried authoritarian centrally planned economies, which isn’t what either of those things are. Hammers marketed as wrenches. No one you’re talking about has ever tried the wrench.
Except worker co-ops.
Right, but I’m not arguing for unregulated capitalism. I think capitalism should be highly regulated. I’m arguing for fair markets that reward good actors and punish bad. I’m arguing for continually refining capitalism and fixing the problems. Which is why I keep having this argument. You’re obviously an intelligent person, motivated to change society for the better, with a good moral compass. I want you on my side. I want people to want to work on the actual problems, and not pin their hopes on some big idea that will fix everything, because that doesn’t exist.
This is the cognitive dissonance about Marxism that bugs me the most. You believe that a system such as Capitalism is so flawed that it must be replaced with something else, but you are unwilling to see that Socialism is also flawed in different ways. If you adhered to the principles of pure Marxism, you would see that Socialism as well must be discarded for a better alternative. Instead of seeing that, you will label every failed Socialist state as a fake. We need something else.
What examples are you thinking of?
China, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, Cuba. Every single time, the state becomes authoritarian and repressive, ignoring human rights, starving and imprisoning huge populations. Eventually it either fails, or the state keeps the authoritarianism, but gets rid of the communism. Look at China and Vietnam. They’ve transitioned to a mostly market based economy, but kept the authoritarianism.
These are examples of everyone starving because centrally planned economies are a bad idea.
Russia
China
North Korea
You’re being downvoted because you straw manned, not sure if intentionally or not.
Like…really? Do you think that this community, or anyone worth talking to, thinks that it’s that easy?
Was it straw man, or ad hominem? Are you thinking that I shouldn’t have called Marx stupid, or that I misrepresented his concept?
The communist manifesto doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker, and even that’s just an introduction to his theories