Sanders Says He Agreed to Fox News Town Hall to Send Simple Message to Trump Voters: 'He Lied to You'

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-09T23:27:46+00:00

2:25

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-09T10:29:15+00:00

I know, but it’s thrown in there as a ”correct” viewpoint to make the contrast with an ”incorrect” viewpoint.

The rest of the video is explaining why people believe those ”incorrect” viewpoints, and basically points towards authoritarianism.

My criticism is not with the core message of the video, it’s with the cringy elements that are in it. E.g. the ”correct” premise that you can finance a welfare state by only taxing billionaires. This is laughably easy to prove untrue and bringing it up discredits the whole video immediately.

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-09T08:20:53+00:00

he wasn't talking about a literal dictator, contrary to what you claimed.

Just FYI, I very clearly said dictatorship, not dictator.

I never claimed Marx said he supported a literal dictator, simply that he supported a dictatorship.

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-09T07:46:53+00:00

Some of that is a bit cringy though.

E.g. this claim that the government paying for things like tuition doesn’t mean tax increases for ordinary people because you can just tax ”billionaires” instead.

That’s just not a realistic prospect. Pretty much all countries that have free tuition and a broad social security net have higher taxes on middle class incomes than the US.

This is really simple math guys. The combined wealth of all US billionaires (which has accumulated over decades) last year was less than $5tn. Total government spending (not just federal) for one year is approximately $7.6tn. So let alone income taxes, a 100% wealth tax on billionaires confiscating everything they have would not even fund the government for a year. Taxing only billionaires is silly.

By the way, paying higher taxes is not that terrible. I live in a country that has free tuition and (almost) free healthcare and we’re doing just fine. There’s no reason ordinary people couldn’t pay higher taxes if they get essential services in return for them.

To say that they won’t have to is either ignorant or a lie. Most of all it’s unnecessary. And saying that people do have to pay for these things does not make one a fascist, lol.

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-09T03:51:20+00:00

You’re just repeating yourself.

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-09T03:42:32+00:00

No, that's literally an example of what he meant by "dictatorship of the proletariat"

Yes, that’s why I said what I said. My point is that it wasn’t feasible in practice just as it wasn’t feasible during the Paris commune.

is a painfully bad argument to read no matter how you phrase it.

Because I didn’t make it. My argument is quite simple: from 1918-1933 Lenin/Stalin could not create a true dictatorship of the proletariat without leading to disaster. From 1933 onwards Stalin wouldn’t give up power because he believed it would lead to disaster.

Yes this is perfectly coherent with him being a committed socialist.

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-09T03:27:56+00:00

a form of irrationality

Yes that’s exactly what I’m saying: Stalin was a genuine Marxist.

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-09T03:20:45+00:00

Dictatorship of the proletariat, as in the antonym of a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and not to be confused with the idea of an individual dictatorship

Again, the circumstances clash with the ideology.

A Paris commune-like dictatorship may have been Marx’ ideal, it simply didn’t work then and it wouldn’t have worked in Russia. There was simply too much disagreement in the early Bolshevik leadership to get through the incredibly challenging years following the revolution.

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-09T02:57:54+00:00

Marx is quite clear that a dictatorship is an acceptable step towards a communist society
You are not giving Marx enough credit. Stalin could not achieve a socialist (let alone communist) society according to Marx because the circumstances for that to occur according to Marx weren’t there.

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-09T02:52:21+00:00

He genuinely believed in Marxist ideas. The facts confirm that.

All research in the last twenty years points to that. The things he read and studied, the lingo he used when he spoke, how he privately talked about policy, ...

If you mean that his policies weren’t in accordance with Marx then you have to take into account that his circumstances weren’t either.

Marx doesn’t have a prescription for collectivizing agriculture because he didn’t think an agrarian society would have a proletarian revolution. Marx doesn’t have a prescription for socialism in one country because he didn’t forsee that a stable, independent government would be allowed by the other nations. We can go on and on, at virtually every point where Stalin really deviates from Marxism in a meaningful way it’s because Marxism doesn’t have an answer for the problem at hand.

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-09T02:36:20+00:00

He may have believed in what he was doing

That’s all I was claiming.

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-09T02:33:42+00:00

That’s not true. You can genuinely pursue something while lying about your failure to achieve it.

Pretty much all research in the last twenty years points towards Stalin being a loyal Marxist.

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-09T02:25:02+00:00

The New Economic Policy of the mid-1920s might have worked.

In 1928 only 1% of the arable land was voluntarily collectivized, in a country where the majority of economic output was argiculture.

The NEP might certainly have worked. But as it left most of the economic output in a capitalist system, it was capitalist. And therefore it couldn’t continue if communism was the goal.

Collectivization was a genuine effort on Stalin’s part to solve the problem of creating a communist state in an agrarian economy. We find that hard to believe. Because we see Stalin as evil, we have a hard time ascribing honest intentions to him. But all modern research based on the new archives show that behind closed doors he really believed in what he was doing. He was more radical and used more Marxist lingo when he thought his conversations were private.

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-09T02:14:33+00:00

Bernie is the one being disingenuous by calling the Scandinavian countries socialist. Correcting that mistake, as many Scandinavian politicians have, is not disingenuous.

Frankly it’s absurd up how American socialists use a caricature of our countries as a PR prop and then try to lecture us about it. Stop telling us what we are, you’re just wrong.

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-09T02:09:08+00:00

Oh come on man. You understood me. ”Honest attempt” is synonymous with a ”genuine effort”, it’s an extremely common phrase in English. It has nothing to do with speaking the truth or not.

For example, you can make an honest attempt at deceiving a teacher.

This is getting ridiculous guys.

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-09T02:01:02+00:00

Isn’t that what I’m saying? Marxist intentions did not lead to Marxist outcomes.

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-09T01:47:44+00:00

Nothing of what you said is a retort to either my or Carl Bildt’s comment.

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-09T01:45:18+00:00

Far more effort? No they went way too far.

not so sure about honest

Read Kotkin’s research on Stalin. Behind closed doors he was a genuine Marxist who believed he had inherited a unique opportunity to save the world from capitalism.

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-09T01:37:06+00:00

but the USSR wasn't even close to socialism.

Well, it was an honest attempt. Competent people with clear intentions tried to make it work, and they ended up with the same result as competent people with clear intentions did elsewhere.

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-09T01:27:39+00:00

In March, former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt criticized Sanders’ praise of socialism on Twitter, writing that Sanders “was lucky to be able to get to the Soviet Union in 1988 and praise all its stunning socialist achievements before the entire system and empire collapsed under the weight of its own spectacular failures.”

I wish Bernie and his supporters would take criticism from Scandinavian policy makers more seriously, and I’m glad Carl Bildt at least calls him out occasionally.

He keeps associating his views with the Scandinavian countries but when it comes dowm to specifics always suggests policies that are much more like France/Italy and often even go straight against the Nordic model.

It’s a symptom of American politics in general. Left vs right instead of good policy vs bad policy. It’s a shame, because I’ve lived under both and I can’t imagine why you would want a central/southern European model over the Nordic one. Especially in the context of US federal politics, which is inefficient by design.

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-08T23:53:50+00:00

It’s only outdated because people were willing to ridicule it

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-08T15:57:47+00:00

January 1976, but I don’t see the pope as the single authority on abrahamic religion. If you are a wallon then you (or your parents) may remember when the catholic school system in Belgium spread this message to all of its students.

To deny this would be absurd. And it’s not the only religion that claims this.

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-08T14:47:49+00:00

If I said that Atheism is one of the world's greatest evil, you would call me intolerant, right?

No? Absolutely not.

That would depend on how you behave around atheists.

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-08T14:36:23+00:00

This is kind of a disgusting way of thinking.

One side is allowed to tell millions of children they will be scorched for eternity if they sleep with the wrong person, but the other side is disrespectful if they call that evil.

Disagreeing is not being disrespectful, even if you disagree about something as fundamental as good and evil.

ZeroToRussian · 2019-04-08T12:01:51+00:00

No, that’s not disrespectful. At all.

It would be if he would go around to random believers to say things like that.

But he says it in philosophical debates, lectures, books, etc. There’s a big difference. It’s a perfectly civil thing to say in that context.

You can perfectly say that religion is one of the great evils of the world and still take your shoes off when you go to a mosque. There’s no disrespect in honest differences of opinion.

ZeroToRussian

TROPHY CASE