Would you unfriend or blacklist someone over politics?

Lol!!

 

What are you ranting about? Really man, her point was very obvious, she was "disappointed" at how fast they embraced the "evil" of capitalism after shedding the crushing aspects of communism. Warren clearly thinks they were better off being fisted behind an iron curtain than making deals for their own future. At some point the control freaks expose themselves, and Warren is a perfect example.

 

I think you're misunderstanding her point. She's disappointed that, when given a chance for viable economic systems, they embraced neoliberlism. She doesn't say they'd be better off under communism. She thinks they'd be better off without either communism or neoliberalism and overnight privatization, "despite enormous risk of corruption." It's not a binary choice.

 

Interesting take since it seems to be THE binary choice in the US at the moment.

 

Well, you can agree to disagree when it comes to family. But it would be pretty tough to want to hang out with family if I realized through political conversations, that they are racist and vehemently disagree with my values. Sorry you're in such a spot.

I wonder why we make concessions for family though, as often as we do. As if sharing DNA is an acceptable reason to make excuses for bad behaviors.

 

I almost have no common opinion with any of my family. We get a long. My family is cool like they, to each their own. Some of my sisters values are so far off mine but we just don't talk about it or anything. If I can still have reputable relationship with my family that grew out of the politics they had to, anyone can. all comes down to your tolerance and how much you value your own opinions etc.

See, I value my opinions, but I know full well someone might disagree. That doesn't bother me, nowhere near enough to start shunning out anybody.

I keep saying it, I don't understand people and their tendency to think there's only one way of thinking and everyone else is wrong and disregard them. I'll never understand it. Only thing I know for sure, is I think I'm a better person for it cause if you don't agree with me you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to talk to you tomorrow like nothing happened. Because nothing did. Some people though, they'll go cold on your for weeks, months.. Years. Over what? A disagreement?

No one needs that shit in their life.

 

Both sides come down to what you view as political. I have some friends and family that have ideologies polar opposite of mine, but have never written them off for it.

While on the other hand when some of those friends and family start expressing extremely blatant white-supremacy, for example, then they start heading down the hole of being entirely written off. Which unfortunately has happened.

 

Did you ever take a history course covering Nazism and Stalinism? Did you pass it? Calling Stalin and Hitler "two peas in the same pod, just a nazism and communism were well" is just wrong. Both shared a some similarities as totalitarian systems, but they are certainly not "of a similar ideology". Nazism relied primarily on nationalism and racism as legitimating ideological tenets. Stalinism relied on dialectical materialism, stressing economic determinism and class instead of race. Hitler's base was the middle class. Stalin's was the working class. Stalinism was relatively egalitarian, at least in theory, and tried to purge bourgeois elements.. Nazism was anti-egalitarian and socially conservative. "Socialism" in the name National Socialism was a strategic deception to attract working class support, but it was unsuccessful. The purge of the Roehm and the Brown Shirts eliminated Socialists from the party. He turned instead to the industrialists--I.G. Farben, Hoesch, Krupp, Siemens, Allianz etc. Socialists were among the earliest targets of Nazi violence. Soon after taking power, the Nazis banned the Social Democratic Party and put its leaders oinconcentration camps. Nazism, socialism and the falsification of history Historian Ian Kershaw (Hitler: A Biography, 2010) notes: Hitler's "crude social-Darwinism dictated his approach to the economy, as it did his entire political 'world-view.' Social Darwinism isn't a Stalinist concept. Richard J. Evans in The Coming of the Third Reich writes that Nazism was concerned with “replacing class with race, and the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of the leader”.Emry concludes: "Above all, the Nazis were German white nationalists. What they stood for was the ascendancy of the “Aryan” race and the German nation, by any means necessary. Despite co-opting the name, some of the rhetoric, and even some of the precepts of socialism, Hitler and party did so with utter cynicism, and with vastly different goals. The claim that the Nazis actually were leftists or socialists in any generally accepted sense of those terms flies in the face of historical reality." Were the Nazis Socialists?

 

Panic

That is completely wrong – did you see or read the whole speech, or just that small clip?

If people are interested they can read the full transcript of the speech here

Elizabeth Warren foreign policy speech: Read the transcript | Boston.com

From the very beginning she makes it clear she is talking about a particular type of predatory capitalism, (she terms cutthroat capitalism) as part of the wider policies of neo-liberalism (that favour wealth).

Let’s start with a serious problem: Around the world, democracy is under assault. Authoritarian governments are gaining power. Right-wing demagogues are gaining strength. Movements toward openness and pluralism have stalled and begun to reverse. Inequality is rapidly growing, transforming rule by-the-people into rule by-wealthy-elites. And here at home, many American politicians seem to accept – even embrace – the politics of division and resentment.

So, how did we get here? There’s a story we tell as Americans, about how we built an international order – one based on democracy, human rights, and improving economic standards of living for everyone. It wasn’t perfect – we weren’t perfect – but our foreign policy benefited a lot of people around the world.

It’s a good story, with long roots. But in recent decades, something changed.

Beginning in the 1980’s, Washington’s focus shifted from policies that benefit everyone to policies that benefit a handful of elites, both here at home and around the world.

Mistakes piled on mistakes. Reckless, endless wars in the Middle East. Trade deals rammed through with callous disregard for our working people. Extraordinary expansion of risk in the global financial system. Why? Mostly to serve the interests of big corporations while ignoring the interests of American workers.

Add in decades of domestic policies that have helped the rich get richer and left everyone else behind, and it’s no wonder Americans have less faith in democratic government today than at any other time in modern U.S. history.

She then goes on to point out the malevolent effects this predatory capitalisms (cutthroat capitalism) has caused

For decades, the leaders of both parties preached the gospel that free trade was a rising tide that would lift all boats. Great rhetoric – except that the trade deals they negotiated mainly lifted the yachts-and threw millions of working Americans overboard to drown.

Policymakers were willing to sacrifice American jobs-not their own, of course-in return for boosting sales at Walmart and gaining access to consumer markets around the world.

Washington had it all figured out. And this confidence spilled over into more than trade deals. Champions of cutthroat capitalism pushed former Soviet states to privatize as quickly as possible, despite the risk of corruption. They looked the other way as China manipulated its currency to advance its own interests and undercut work done here in America.

Washington technocrats backed austerity, deregulation, and privatization around the world. As one crisis after another hit, the economic security of working people around the globe was destroyed, reducing public faith in both capitalism and democracy.

Policymakers promised that open markets would lead to open societies.

Wow. Did Washington get that one wrong. Efforts to bring capitalism to the global stage unwittingly helped create the conditions for anti-democratic countries to rise up and lash out.

Russia has become belligerent and resurgent. China has weaponized its economy without loosening its domestic political constraints. And over time, in country after country, faith in both capitalism and democracy has eroded.

A program once aimed at promoting the forces of freedom ended up empowering the opposite.

[my bold]

 

Panic

It is only binary if you are someone like 6 who seems to thinks in a black and white binary way so that it is either you support a particular (and rather extreme) form of right wing thinking OR you are a leftie.

If you are the type that thinks that it is either cutthroat neoliberalist capitalism or Stalinist communism then yes you might see in this clip Warren as some type of communist control freak, but I think any objective and unbiased viewing would come to another conclusion, doubly so if they had read the full speech.

I and many others here want the US is be less binary the problem is that many on the right seem to only think in binary in the sense of ‘you are either with us or against us’

 

Okie

I think Elizabeth Warren is right about the connection between the neoliberalism and Putin’s Russia.

I watched in horror as the Soviet Union fell and carpetbaggers rushed in from the outside and criminals arose from within. While a few became rich the many suffered, I watched footage of old women selling there worldly good out on the street and old men selling there war metals to foreigners for a few pence and thought, the Russians are going to hate the west for this.

There has been much written about the conversion of communist Russia into capitalist Russia, the right wing think tanks (and there wealthy sponsors) have promoted the myth of the ‘triumph of capitalism’. I even remember at the time reading a piece in a newspaper arguing that the rise of the Russian mafia was a good thing as it showed just how well the country was adapting to the ‘free market’.

But there are more sober account people could try The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.

As a report from the United Nations Development Programme in 1999 pointed out that the economic transition had brought about a “demographic collapse“ with a steep drop in life expectancy “What we are arguing,” said Omar Noman, an economist for the development fund and one of the report’s contributors, “is that the transition to market economies [in the region] is the biggest … killer we have seen in the 20th century, if you take out famines and wars. The sudden shock and what it did to the system … has effectively meant that five million [Russian men’s] lives have been lost in the 1990s.”

Russians didn’t just forget those times and see them as the time of ‘humiliation’ perpetrated by America and the West (which is used for propaganda purposes by Putin) and it has been said that ‘the Russian president’s worldview is built around the idea that the west has deliberately weakened and humiliated Russia for decades’.

The thing is in my view the rise of nationalism and popularism around the world often has its roots in the adoption or imposition of neo-liberal policies.

 

Okie

Thing is I think I can see where 6 is coming from - it’s just that he doesn’t seem able to say it clearly because he is (1) led by his bias and prejudice and (2) he know consciously or subconsciously that it doesn’t strengthen his hand.

Basically 6 seems to see things in black and white – to him there are two forms of government (or should be) one has some form of government involvement in the economy (to him Socialism) and the other where the market is free from government interference (to him capitalism)

So since the Nazis and the Stalinists both had some degree and from of central planning they are in his view exactly the same.

I’ve been told many times by certain right wingers that the majority of European countries are not really capitalist because they have too much involvement in the markets, hell I’ve been told that about the US.

This simplistic view of the world means he missed the complexities and details.

 

Okie

Now many people have pointed out the National Socialists seem to have had had more affinity with Social Darwinist ideas than they did with socialist ones and its why many link the Nazis with the right wing spectrum as so many strands of right wing thought are based on Social Darwinist thinking.

So could it be argued that actually 6, with his Social Darwinist based thinking, actually has more in common with the Nazis than modern day socialist that reject it completely? LOL

*

Well there are certainly differing strands in Social Darwinist but all basically come back to the idea that there are ‘naturally’ occurring inferior and superior people (they often bring up the idea of fast runners and slow runners) and that humans are locked in a Darwinist competition for position and from which the fittest would reveal themselves by been in socially superior position than the inferior.

This was attractive to those already were in socially superior position (and used their wealth to promote it) as it gave the fig leaf of a justification for social and political inequality.

A lot of modern free market and neoliberal ideas are based on pseudo-scientific ideas of Social Darwinism although they would not like to admit this.

Social Darwinism also appealing to imperialists and racists. If you had conquered and were ruling over another country or group of people then it stood to reason that in Darwinist terms you must be ‘scientifically’ superior and should rule over them, and from that it is a short step to racism, the view that some races were superior to others.

But Social Darwinism always comes back to what is to be done with the inferior? The Social Darwinist manta is ‘survival of the fittest’ so what should happen to the unfit, follow the logic of the manta and it would seem to be not survive. For many imperialists and racist that was fine but what about the more ‘civilised’ ideas promoted by the free marketeers and neo-liberals?

Well it seems to me that many free market and right wing liberation types would be content with a ‘work or starve’ type of society and at least one was happy to say that he’d be happy if starvation did happen and death was the result of it.

Also it should be remembered that in societies with high levels of inequality (that neo-liberalism brings about) the disadvantaged have shorter lives than the advantaged and in places were healthcare is based on ability to pay (another free market idea) the poorer are even more likely to die earlier than the richer.

Here is a quote from the great champion of Social Darwinism, Herbert Spencer -

It seems hard that a labourer incapacitated by sickness from competing with his stronger fellows should have to bear the resulting privations. It seems hard that widows and orphans should be left to struggle for life or death. Nevertheless, when regarded not separately, but in connection with the interests of universal humanity, these harsh fatalities are seen to be full of the highest beneficence…the same beneficence that brings to early graves the children of diseased parents, and singles out the low-spirited, the intemperate, and the debilitated as the victims of an epidemic. . .

 

A few of my friends think Mao was a good dude. I usually just laugh.

 

No I wouldn't. Many people get angry over this and fight. It's not something I'd unfriend someone over.

It's crazy. So I never bring it up. It's best to keep things civil.

 

I'm all for people that would, to unfriend me and block me etc. I would be okay with that. then maybe my Facebook would clean up to the more important things in life like 75 days until Daytona.

 

I may unfriend someone over politics if the things they wrote or interacting with them was very upsetting to me.

 

Seems to me that if politics, an outside phenomenon, can actually cause family strife to the point of walkouts and actual fighting, the family was already in trouble and any fucking excuse would be employed. Politics is just very very convenient and absolutely polarizing. So it's the perfect weapon to use on an already weak house.

 

This website confirms my stance, really. I've become aware of people's opposing views by seeing their posts, and still felt the desire to befriend them, because overall I like them as people. So given that, I'm unlikely to cut off someone who is already a friend.

I just don't see people's political leanings or prejudices as "who they are" and so I don't care. Those things may change. Maybe they won't. But it's just a result of the life they have led, that they have reached those views. Maybe friendship with someone who thinks the opposite will be part of the life they lead that brings them to new views, or maybe it won't. Cutting each other off seems to have a more definite trajectory, and I don't think it's a good one.

 

I call them saints.

They are controversial, and they've been silenced by the social media establishment. Which is why I've asked you to provide some controversial leftists who've been silenced by the social media establishment.

Where's YOUR proof that silicone valley isn't left biased? Where's your proof aside from a fallible Guardian article? I've given you nearly 3 weeks to come up with something, and you've given me nothing. Except for Lode who provided an example of DiDi Delgado getting a temporary suspension for spreading racism.

Here, Facebook names a conference room at the company headquarters after arch-feminist, left wing provocateur, and gamergate warrior Anita Sarkeesian. Anita Sarkeesian on Twitter

But there's no left wing bias at Facebook It's libertarian biased according to you.