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Notes -
Suppose communism is bad (if you think it's good this isn't addressed to you but sure feel free to chime in). How do you teach normies this?
I mean the kind of normie who lives in a world where powers far beyond them do incomprehensible things like set the prices of stuff in the store, so that some of the stuff they really want is too expensive for them, but look, the store is full of that stuff, so somebody has all this stuff but they're not letting them have it except for way too high a price, those greedy assholes.
And then you try to explain to them how markets work and how prices come to be and it all just comes across to them as some weird bootlicking apologism because they're simply not on that level.
Is there a more "down to earth" approach that is needed? Normies who have deeply internalized rules of decency and ideas of "thou shalt not steal" (often normies with religious backgrounds) seem to naturally be anti-communist.
Now I'm sure some of y'all here (you know who you are) will say these people basically just need to be oppressed because if they have their way civilization is destroyed and everything is shitty for everybody, but if you oppress them then they complain but otherwise you have a civilization that hums along. But I hate this, I feel like there has to be a way to make society work that doesn't require telling a huge segment of the population "stfu and get in line or we're putting you in a cage". And I mean obviously violent (as needed) enforcement of civilized norms is necessary, but I notice there are a lot more people who are sympathetic to communist ideas than are actual active criminals. My point is more about these people, not the active criminals (who I support putting in cages)
Is there really no way to get through to people other than to just tell them shut up and take it because we're trying to run a civilization here
Isn’t the simple response “the millions upon millions dead plus the remaining in abject poverty speak for themselves.” Even if the interlocutor responds with a no true Scotsmans defense, point out it was tried a lot more than once and every time it ends in perdition.
This does not secure one against the all too common delusion that if noble men were in charge, none of the horrible stuff would have happened.
You have to confront people with their own ability to do evil. Otherwise you are talking about aliens. You need to remind people that Stalin was not a mystical creature of unfathomable evil, but just a man like you or I.
If noble men were in charge it wouldn't be communism, it would be an aristocracy.
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I used to scoff at this too, but I warmed up to it somewhat. Communists have easily been in the Top 3 Most Bad Faith Groups in my experience, and while I can imagine a noble man bumbling his way into a famine, I have a harder time imagining him endorsing the early revolutionary terror.
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The response to that is 1) men wouldn’t need government if they were angels and 2) animal farm seemed to happen quite often — odd that each and every commie experiment was carried out by a Napoleon.
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