AOC is socialist. Is that bad?

No, they probably get it (though only know of the state varietal, so a limited grasp).

 

Here's the thing: If you have made a choice (bad or good), then you are necessarily not in need. You may be in want as a result of your choices, but that's beside the point. NEED results from zero choice.

Really, if you think that you can exercise this outrageously spastic 'largess' toward spoiled First Worlders (predicated solely on instant feel-good gratification) in a world of finite resources, and that it won't ultimately cost millions of genuinely needy people their very lives, then you're not even in the compassion race, much less a contender.

My post focuses on parental responsibility because PARENTS ARE RESPONSIBLE. You seem to be suggesting that they don't have to be. Yet more outrageous hubris, which will cost those in need. And yes, all humans make mistakes. The idea is to try NOT to. Spastic easy largess actually enables mistakes. Why would you do that?

 

Communism is to socialism as fascism is to capitalism.

 

We agree to disagree.

 

You use the word "temporary" in reference to welfare assistance. That's accurate. Welfare opponents talk as if welfare was a permanent status. It isn't. And, it DOES help those in need for a period allowing them to fix their own personal lives. I support it as a beneficial program.

 

Your posts tend to take every point to its ultimate extreme & measure values based on that extreme position. Life is more balanced, and I want my judgments to be equally so. Your points are both too extreme & too rigid for my comfort. I'm more flexible & forgiving with life in general & with those challenged by it. I prefer it that way.

 

Temporary welfare (for circumstances beyond the control of the individual .. lay offs, deaths of breadwinner, etc) should always be available. I would say 6 months as a very generous timeframe. If it's needed longer than that then there is some personal responsibility involved.

And welfare opponents aren't concerned about the victim of circumstances who needs welfare for a few months, they're concerned about the far larger number who make a career of it. And rightly so.

 

For those who knowingly abuse the welfare system for prolonged periods, I agree with you, They should be dealt with harshly.

 

Indiscriminate 'forgiveness' is not a virtue, it's a character flaw. Sorry, but calling it as it is.

When we indiscriminately allocate our care/concern, we fail to focus it where it's actually needed. It's wasteful, lazy, and vain.

There is nothing 'extreme' about wanting to ensure those most in need are the recipients of our care.

 

Being a Commie is always bad but as the forum is at least 70% commie bastards I have to be careful who I say that to.

 

You realise there are millions of long term welfare/assistance recipients in America, I take it? At least, that's what I'm told.

 

Gee, thanks!

Seriously, it isn't though. Communism is voluntary collectivism. We wouldn't do it if we didn't like it, and it has zero impact on those around us. Doesn't impact your freedoms in any way.

 

To the op question. It is not bad that we have a few socialists in Congress. I think it is nothing but good, to have a broad spectrum of ideas reflected in our legislative branch. Now I usually let people tell me their beliefs and decide for themselves if a specific label applies, Let's not shove a label on her, that she does not think actually reflects her.

 

Amen. Congress is at leased supposed to be the hallowed hall of debate, after all.

As to the OP - I haven't heard AOC advocate for state (proletariat) ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, not to mention the end of private ownership. Therefore, she isn't a socialist.

Unless, of course, one is inclined to use the FOX News definition of socialist, which is essentially: Anyone who advocates a government policy that helps anyone other than themselves.

 

Entirely unrelated?

 

To you, maybe. But then, I wasn't responding to you, so...

 

You're saying that fascism and capitalism are related somehow? In what way?

 

Yes, the greed and the desire to take advantage of the others exists in most of the people and it actually comes from the animal nature that exists in everyone of us.
But the super-rich created a culture of greed and they are doing their best to encourage the people to be greedy and corrupt, convincing them that it's absolutely normal to be selfish, greedy, indifferent, cynical and to try to take advantage of the others and to hurt the people around them. They corrupted the Western culture to such an extent that today too many people think that actually selfishness and greed are very good. Not only that, but today too many people believe that actually selfishness and greed are a proof of intelligence.

- It is one thing to understand that there is a potential, a spark of selfishness and greed inside every human being and inside yourself to and to keep it under control and to act responsible and to be a decent and a good citizen.
- And it's totally something else to believe that actually selfishness and greed and the desire to take advantage of others are good things and to promote such a toxic mindset and to do your best to hurt the people around you, based on such views.

One very efficient weapon of the super-rich is spreading confusion. They are doing their best to keep the people confused and they always promote all kind of views and slogans based on very ambiguous claims. It requires a good deal of effort and introspection in order to remove that confusion and to make the difference between the two above mentioned views about selfishness and greed. Most of the people don't have enough time and energy to invest into that and they actually are not even aware of the real problem - they do not even know that they are confused - because that's exactly how confusion works!
The super-rich are using the media and the corporate culture in order to spread the confusion.
And because of that confusion, the majority of the people support the criminal and murderous decisions of the super-rich (and of their politician puppets) who always get the money from the poor and give it to the rich and who always drive the population into deeper and deeper poverty (speculation, debt, trade deficit etc). Simply because they are not aware of the alternatives and therefore they are not capable to coordinate and to have a reaction to counter those bad decisions of the administration.

The very power of the USA came from it's religion - from the protestant culture to be more exact. In those communities there was a lot of solidarity - and the rich people were taking care to protect the poor people.
But the super-rich people - and especially the international bankers - did their best to replace that culture with a culture of greed and selfishness. And that's the very reason why today the USA politics is extremely corrupt and that's exactly the reason why the country is almost bankrupt: the country is not capable to pay it's debts anymore and it's always increasing it's debts.

The super-rich and the media are doing their best to convince the people that selfishness and greed are good and they are doing their best to promote that view and to amplify the selfishness and the greed in the people. They are also doing their best to convince the people that moral values have no relevance whatsoever and that actually the moral views are an obstacle to advancing and an obstacle against achieving success.

Actually, the best way for the super-rich to control the poor is to keep them divided and confused. In order to keep the population divided, the super rich are doing their best to remove the morality from the people and to inoculate a criminal mindset in the Western culture.

The USA and many other Western countries are almost bankrupt because the people in those countries are morally bankrupt.

 

If you mean communism as "an ideal" small groups have managed it relatively successfully, although hippy communes aren't really were I want to be lol.

Communism on a country scale always ends in Gulags.

 

well from what I understand it she's a Democratic socialist meaning if you vote for socialism and then you should get it, but if you vote against it they should f*** off.

The minute they don't **** off and try to force it they cease to be Democratic socialist and start becoming authoritarian dictators.

I think it's funny that people who proposed the say we want it to be a democratic system of socialism but they want to implement it through government Fiat.

 

Socialism is simply half-hearted communism. Full socialism = communism.

 

Communism is a form of socialism. Fascism and capitalism have nothing to do with each other.

 

Government is socialism. Management makes All of the Difference. It is Why our Founding Fathers did an Most Excellent job with our federal Constitution and supreme law of the land.

 

Sorry but that's not true. We live in communities of people and therefore we all have to pay taxes in order to properly manage the community. We pay taxes so we can pay the people working in the police, army, secret services, administration, to build roads, to pay for schools, hospitals etc. And we do all that for the very simple reason that we need all those things. That doesn't mean that we are financing anyone - we just pay for the goods and the services we need.
If you are thinking about the people living from welfare, that's something else.
It is fundamental principle in communication to be specific enough and to point exactly at the things you want to talk about. As opposed to that, making general and vague statements is only making the conversation inconsistent, it is growing confusion and it makes it very easy to derail the conversation into all kind of irrelevant stuff. Please try to be more specific and to come with real-life examples, otherwise the conversation is becoming very inefficient.

Now, when talking about welfare, the percent of the people not working and living from the welfare in the West is not so high, they can be easily supported by the working people. And it's the poor workers paying for them, not the rich people.
But the problem is that the system is encouraging the leeches to live from welfare, because that's how the corrupt politicians manage to increase the poverty of the working people who support those leeches. So the administration is only growing this problem by encouraging such people to live a life in complacency. Instead, the administration should ask the leeches to do something in return for the welfare - at very least, they can do independent journalism, edit Wikipedia, add free photos to pixabay, they can clean the streets and many other things like that.
The administration is paying the housing for those leeches - and they pay enormous amounts of money to the real-estate speculators who always increase the price of the housing. Once again, the government is getting the money from the poor working taxpayers and it's giving it to the rich, using the welfare as an excuse, as a pretext for doing it.

Sorry but that's absolutely false.
Most of the time, the socialists are taking the money from the poor and they give it to the rich. One such great example is Barack Obama. He always took the money from the poor in order to give it to the rich - that's what he always did.
He took the taxpayer money and he gave it to the incompetent and criminal bankers who created the speculation and the debt crisis and who stole the money of their depositors (Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase) in order to provide them bailouts. And then the government had less money to pay for the people working in the administration and to hire enough people in the administrative apparatus. He also increased the debts of the country in order to do that.
So he took the money from the poor and he gave it to the rich and to the criminals.
Tony Blair is another great example. He works for LVMH, making more than 100,000 Euro / month, and the company is exploiting the workers in Romania, paying them a wage of 133 Euro / month. Therefore the company is stealing the money from the poor workers in order to pay a high wage to Tony Blair.

No, the socialists are helping the rich to get richer. And they drive the rest of the population into deeper and deeper poverty, using the welfare as an excuse for taking the money from the poor and giving it to the leeches and to the rich. If you don't believe that, then check how the wealth inequality evolved in the West in the last decades.

The socialism can not do anything good and bad. Only the socialist politicians can do something good and bad. The socialism is just a tool, like for example a knife. You can't accuse a knife for hurting someone but you can actually accuse the person who used that knife in order to hurt someone.
And most of the time they take the money from the poor and they give it to the rich. They create a system that is socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.

Again, a tool can not be self-sustaining or independent. Only the people using that tool can be like that. It's a nonsense to claim that a knife or a plow is self-sustaining or not.
All the current capitalist systems in this world are unreliable and they are actually a disaster. No capitalist country is capable to pay it's debts and their inflation and speculation and poverty is always growing. The poor people always pay for the crimes of the rich people - for example the bailouts of the 10 billion $US gift made to the General Motors. On top of that, the countries from Africa, Latin America and Asia are the best proof that the capitalist systems do not work.
But that's not because of the capitalism. That situation exists simply because the politicians are very corrupt. Remove the corruption and then the capitalist system can work.
However it is pretty much impossible to do that when the majority of the people firmly believe (thanks to the education they get) that selfishness, greed and corruption are actually very good.

No, you are trying to minimize the role of the corruption but actually the corruption is the very root of the problem. The life in communist Hungary was a paradise comparing to the life in the communist Romania simply because the president Kadar had zero tolerance for corruption.
The fair trade and free markets do not exist in the capitalist systems of the poor countries, and that's because of the corruption. In those countries you can only get a licence to do business if you are connected to the corrupt politicians.
The fair trade doesn't even exist in the Western countries anymore. The consumers have to pay more and more money for the basic necessities of life like housing and utilities (electricity, internet). The apartments have astronomical prices and they are out of the reach for the many. The governments are doing their best to increase the real-estate speculation. The price of the electricity is ever-increasing. There is no competition in the USA between the internet providers, there is no net neutrality so the internet providers are free do implement extortion.

That's not true. IBM was paid with the money from the government in order to advance the research in computing. The USA govt. is investing a lot of money in research, and that's actually a form of socialism. Yes, they once again took the money from the poor and gave it to the rich. But that's not killing the incentive to produce.

It is that very government that is always increasing the poverty of the people and it's that very government that is always encouraging the leeching (living from welfare), instead of encouraging work. Capitalists or socialists, all the US politicians are using the leeches in order to grow the poverty - because they (the politicians) are all servants and puppets of the super-rich. One remarkable exception is Donald Trump - and that's why he is getting all that negative media - because he refused to be a puppet for the bankers - he reversed the Quantitative Easing (in Europe the politicians refuse to reverse it because they are all sold to the international bankers). The Quantitative Easing was a 4 trillion $US gift from the "wonderful socialist" Barack Obama for the criminal bankers, a "solution" created with the intention of increasing either the inflation or the debt of the countries. They had no intention whatsoever to return the money (and Europe is the full-proof for that) and now they are doing their best to promote a negative view about Trump because of that.

This is absolutely false, the situation in Venezuela was very bad, the poverty and the criminality was very high, the politicians were treating the people like trash, and the people were choosing communism because they were desperate with that "healthy and prosperous situation" - where the prosperity is reserved only for the rich.

No, the selfishness, the greed and the corruption are like an addiction disease.
The current system actually breeds the idea that speculation and the debt are some kind of cure for our pain, so we need to accept more of it.
The politicians, the media, the corporations and the "experts in economy" always claim that "Speculation is good because it creates jobs! So we need more and more of it!"
They also claim that "Debt is good because it spins the wheel of economy! So we need more and more of it!"
They also claim that "A little bit of inflation is good!"
They also claim that "We have to increase the poverty in order to improve the economy!"
They always make more and more debts, the countries are not capable to pay their debts and there is only one end for that: insolvency and the crash of the economy.

No, the Western culture is fatally flawed. It was transformed, step by step, into a cult of greed and selfishness and into a culture of corruption.
There is only one eventual end for USA and for the Western European countries: the collapse of the economy. Also the collapse of the society.
The Western countries are not individual states anymore, they are just collections of greedy and selfish people with a criminal mindset.
London and Switzerland are pretty much the capitals of the World's organized crime, all the corrupt politicians from all over the world save their stolen money in the banks of London and Switzerland.
The super-rich are desperate to create a new economic crisis as soon as possible. That's why they are so insane about Donald Trump, because Trump was slowing them down and that actually gives time to the people to wake up and to understand the real nature of their problems and the real solutions
And when the economy will collapse, instead of taxing the rich, the solution of the corrupt politicians will be to increase the poverty of the population.
They always did that and they will always try to do it, because they are extremely corrupt.
Check the Irish Famine (1850) for example with the Cheap Ejectment Act when the country was still exporting food (maize) but the "solution" of the government was to starve one million people to death (20%) of the population "in order to improve the economy".

But it all boils down to a very simple principle:
The super-rich and their servants are always trying to promote ideologies as solutions, instead of promoting common sense actions.
They always try to convince the people that they have to wait for a new system and for a new ideology to fix their problems, because they want to convince the people that they (the people) can not fix their own problems and they have to wait for the politicians to save them.
Look at the Amish community - they are capable to provide jobs and housing to all the people in their community and they don't need politicians nor ideologies in order to fix their problems. They have a vastly superior economy comparing to the economies of the Western countries. They are capable to live without debts and to prosper while the Western countries are only capable to make more and more debts and to produce more and more poverty.
And that's because the politics, the political parties, the politicians and the ideologies are just tools that the super-rich are using in order to keep the population in poverty.

Also, as a general rule, please try to be more specific in your discourse because the general and vague claims are not really helpful.
Also please try to come with real life examples for supporting your claims with evidence.
In a fantasy land any claim can be valid. But back here on Earth, things are different. Therefore claims have to be supported by reality facts. True reality facts, not invented reality facts.

 

That is one massive dump of pure fertilizer- with so many total illusions it would take pages to address them all. But if as you say- "we all have to pay taxes", why are 47% of our people paying no taxes?
Why are 10% of our taxpayers carrying providing 70% of the total tax receipts- meaning they are the ones paying for the roads, the schools, and all the services the non-payers get free, and why are those who pay nothing (but still get services, thus actually getting a subsidy) still complaining that the rich get off free?

Put those facts on the table. Then take the fact that every socialistic idea depends on the concept of taking money from people who don't support the concept, rather than it being paid for by those who do.. and you have a clear picture of the extent of BS above. it's about 99% hogwash, self-serving socialistic hogwash. It's the same kind of psychology that drives drug addiction, but the drug is other people's money, used to avoid facing personal responsibility- cloaked in the denial you clearly wear with pride. You should be ashamed of being willing to endorse dependency- it is the destroyer of souls and pride in people.