You would better serve yourself and your arguments by affirming rather than downplaying their leftism. I'll also here not take the euphemism, socialism is communism's beachhead in capitalism.
Redistribution of wealth is communist. It cuts both ways, your list includes instances where the primary beneficiaries are corporations, the policies remain communist.
I guess this is the issue lol. Point-by-point, why none of this is particularly radical in most societies that people don't consider "socialist":
Communists, as masters of duplicitous rhetoric, have done an expectedly superb job propagandizing leftist policy objectives as "common sense" and especially as "not communist" or "not socialist." They are not considered radical today because it is the way of things, but those fears named in opposition to, e.g. compulsory education, have been justified. We can't go back, so there's not a real use in invoking either their past appraisal as radical or their current view as normal.
But also not specifically socialist, at all. Very much no means of production being seized.
I would agree directionally, in very strict terms. The concept of regulation is not inherently redistributive, and even in practice I don't know that many examples are redistributive, but they do often impair the market from competition and there corporations benefit.
Another exaggeration. The free part is for buses only. As someone who's taken a lot of public transit in many different cities, buses are frequently used by more blue collar / "barista" type workers, whereas light rail is more often used by professionals. It's a pragmatically progressive (in the sense of: tax those who can afford it) solution to the problem of rising fare prices, imo.
Strictly redistributive. Communist.
Obviously an experimental / pilot project. Curious to see if there's a nice food distribution middle ground between "soup kitchen" and "Whole Foods" that a city government can occupy. An ideal implementation of this looks more like a 7-days-a-week farmer's market to me than a crumbling Aldi with yellowed fluorescent lights and grimey 90s tiles.
The experiment was run for decades and it failed. Communist.
Are grade school, middle school, and high school not "free childcare"?
Compulsory education is indeed free childcare, and it is the perfect example of the myriad failures of ideology in communism:
- That inequality in outcome can be solved through money; here school funding
- That effective systems create effective people; here that good schools make good students
- That a bureaucracy can be trusted with considerable power; here that teachers are broadly competent and judicious
- That the system will fulfill its primary objective rather than be co-opted or brought to heel by superior agents; here a minor rehashing of #2, but specifically that the school exists to educate
Compulsory education as the public school doesn't actually exist to educate. It educates incidentally, just as a little less incidentally it incorporates students into the cult of the state. Its function is redistributing wealth to the bourgeoise so they don't have to either pay for childcare, accommodate flexible hours for their laborers, or worst of all, have to deal with a 50% smaller workforce and the massive leverage the laborers would gain in negotiations. All to say, the classic example of bad actors prospering from exploiting the system, here capitalism's maybe third-worst practice.
Where I would say today communist ideology has strength is cynicism toward the bourgeoise, where it fails is not showing enough, as even with the means of production seized, the bourgeoise are not made but born, agnostic to actually being of class "bourgeoise," and a communist system will inevitably be controlled by them. The best system accounts for their chronic existence and allows them to flourish in dozens of lanes of competition with each other, while exerting just enough regulation to prevent their exploitation of the commons. Communism reduces that competition to a single lane, and for that it will necessarily and always fail.
Nothing would help the working class more than our economy returning to one where only a single parent needs to draw a salary to support their spouse and children. To that end, anything Mamdani does that increases or keeps static the supply of labor will have harms outweighing all other benefits, and that's even granting that all of his other policies achieve their stated goals.
jake
5d ago
I know little on autism diagnoses. I have a cousin who might be autistic, and then also one friend who is autistic, she's a former FTM who transitioned ~2011, married a man at about the same time and they're still together, moved out of the country and detransitioned a few years later. She's appreciably different from any of my other friends, especially compared to the ones who describe themselves as on the spectrum, but she and I mostly swap pictures of our dogs and I've had some burning questions, assuming you don't mind answering:
- Did you read much as a child? If so, what?
- You mention childhood hallmarks of social issues, did you have few friends? One best friend? Are you friends still? How long have you known your oldest friend?
- Are you attracted to the opposite sex? When did you first notice?
- And this one's just angled at MLP; have you ever read or watched Japanese shoujo? If yes, had you before MLP?
By the way, and I should have said this back at Christmas, but alas. I'd say the probability of your assessment of Ramaswamy falsely professing belief is very high now. I won't go all the way, not because I mind admitting being wrong, you can treat this as my admission of being on the wrong side of assessing him, but because it's not my place to say on this whether someone believes what they say. "He's given adequate reason to doubt him," yes. I do think one of my arguments holds up, that a more competent actor would have found a way to say it without lying, because he dropped a few poorly chosen words on an issue and got himself banished to Ohio.
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