NeilBrü

UnDeshittification

Makes more sense to me if the prefix “en” is used in “enshittification”.

Why do the richest have to be the craziest?!?

Chrystia Freeland, author of Plutocrats, says that the present trend towards plutocracy occurs because the rich feel that their interests are shared by society:

You don’t do this in a kind of chortling, smoking your cigar, conspiratorial thinking way. You do it by persuading yourself that what is in your own personal self-interest is in the interests of everybody else. So you persuade yourself that, actually, government services, things like spending on education, which is what created that social mobility in the first place, need to be cut so that the deficit will shrink, so that your tax bill doesn’t go up. And what I really worry about is, there is so much money and so much power at the very top, and the gap between those people at the very top and everybody else is so great, that we are going to see social mobility choked off and society transformed.

apothrical apocryphal

Or… was that on purpose? Am I not getting the joke?

Yes, I don’t consider the CCP to be “left wing”. Where in my original post did I say “US good”? I don’t think you read what I wrote.

If we’re talking about economic systems or political parties, socialism can indeed be one “answer to authoritarianism”. It can also be authoritarian, even more than what its members seek to replace.

those are opposites.

Not exclusively.

Yes, he was. I would refine the description as a democratic socialist.

One can be a “socialist” and still be anti-authoritarian.

A common person in the contemporary era is assailed by many threats to their autonomy: the religious, the nihilists, the corporatists, the fascists, and the alleged “collectivists”, who we’ll discuss here.

Extreme authoritarian “leftists”, A.K.A. “tankies” (i.e., apologists for Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the CCP, the DPRK, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Xi Jingping, etc.), are also threats to a free, egalitarian, and open society, are just as violent as their authoritarian competitors, and should be treated with the contempt, distrust, and ridicule they deserve.

Why?

They claim to speak and fight for the proletariat, promising a new utopia, never before seen, once their revolution executes the last “class-traitor”. In practice, once they’re finished with “seizing the means of production”, they’ll never relinquish control and become the new ruling class.

They’ll assume the mantle of an “enlightened elite post-revolutionary administration” to guide the proletariat to their promised utopia of “each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. In practice, "the party leadership needs the most, because they’re obviously the most able” in reorganizing the economic and political structure of society. The utopia of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” will never exist, only the dictatorship of the “revolutionary party” will, and repression and execution await those who question their claims and decisions.

These supposed champions of labor are really harbingers of death of the mind, body, and community. They claim to be the true authoritative “voice of the people”. Understand what they really are; power over everything and everyone, forever, is what they seek. They want you either as a true believer (a willing pawn) or dead, just like all of the other supposedly benevolent dictators who promised utopias throughout history.

They’re akin to the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm, the loudest voices in the revolution, usurpers of a righteous cause, but a bit “more equal” than everyone else after the farmer is done away with. Fortunately, the pigs, like the farmer, got their comeuppance in the end of the story. And like all pigs, they will squeal when things don’t go their way.

Never ever trust anyone or any group that says “I am/we’re in charge, fovever”.

To all the infallible unblemished champions of the proletarian revolution who are shitting on “libs”:

According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics and Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future, this is the definition of liberalism:

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law.

In your own words, what do you think “lib” means? And if you’re going with my cited textbook definition, what’s so offensive to you about the tenets that are listed?

Either words’ definitions matter or they don’t, and if they don’t, then none of what you say matters.