It's disturbing that you would express concern over merely badmouthing communism in a crude way within a post about which belief system has been more responsible for death. If this is so important to you why not include a chart of the death toll from the communist regimes in China and the Soviet Union?Lavabug wrote:Eric, I can do math too. Number of events + number of fatal casualties are still led by right wing over islamism in the last 15 years. Turning the dial back a single day to 9/11, including the single outlier in a huge number of casualties, they would still be dwarfed in number of attacks per year by RW extremists but not fatal casualties. I was pretty clear and honest about this, and not diminishing islamic terror, but the statement still stands. The right in the US now kills more people and commits more attacks than islamists. Period.
and not a single one of them communists I might addi am not sure what you are saying above. all i am saying is there are plenty of racists in congress & other high offices. and comparing strom thurmond & his racist legacy on the right to a socialist US senator, a democratic socialist candidate for congress (not an officeholder), and a socialist city councilwoman (not a federal officeholder) on the left is a false equivalency
Democrats reject associations with actual the left because of the post-McCarthy zeitgeist we live in, where communists are dehumanized to the point very few people bat an eye to statements/shirts with statements "kill a commie for mommy" and "better dead than red". Imagine anyone saying something that explicit about conservatives or libertarians and you'll realize just how normalized political violence is against one wing of the political spectrum and not the other. Go around hashtagging a far milder #punchanazi and watch how many self-proclaimed centrists and right wingers swoop in to defend their free speech.
Nancy Pelosi among many other establishment democrats have explicitly stated "we are capitalists" and remain uncritical of free market practices in the face of many of its negative consequences, and praise capitalists instead of worker movements and even giving them credit when a pro-labor struggle ends up working out favorably (see Hillary's appraisal of Jeff Bezos raising amazon's minimum wage, rather than praising the workers and unions that actually put pressure to make it a possibility).
I also don't understand this:
I named three individuals who are openly socialist and hold varying levels of political office off the top of my head. They seem to even be held in high esteem by the left. Maybe there are more that I'm not aware of. Specifically who are these Klansmen and white nationalists who hold office that I'm not aware of? Whether or not people of this persuasion run for office is irrelevant to me, given the outrageous figures who inevitably try but never succeed to get elected.When the conservative establishment in this country starts barring Klansmen and white nationalists from joining their ranks as hard as we bar communists and socialists from running for office, we can begin to entertain the thought that there is a middle ground in mainstream American politics
Finally, if Nancy Pelosi and these other establishment democrats you alluded to are truly in favor of free market capitalism they would be against the practice of government mandated wage floors, which to me makes their remarks about what Amazon did disingenuous to some degree. I won't get into where I personally stand on that issue given the nature of my work and the strange commingling it has with unions, but if you actually look into the tenants of free market capitalism (without even necessarily agreeing with them) you would very quickly understand that the two concepts are completely incompatible, and you would have never made that statement.
I don't care at all that you lean left and of course I don't have negative personal feelings about it, but maybe it would be a good idea to sit down and read a bit more about prominent ideas you don't necessarily agree with. I have done this (admittedly not as much as I should) and although on a number of occasions I came out the other end disagreeing more than ever, there's at least a better understanding of where the other side is coming from.