Hello Holla Forums

Im not for a free market but a taxed and highly regulated one. I support high taxation on the 1% and government retribution of wealth to the lower classes.

or just the manifesto.

or the fucking bread book.

anything, really. Capitalism is not that hard to debunk, it's fucking shit

the same people controlling these taxes are people who can be bribed and lobbied by the very 1% you want to havily tax. You don't suppose you have a genius plan as to how to get past that hurdle?

porky will reverse it all the moment they get the chance.

FDR did exactly what you are calling for, and by the 1980s it was all undone. Its only now that we are seeing the human effects of that.

who is gonna pay for it?

more than that I don't see how a working class starved of economical power can apply in any way any semblance of political power.

OP how do you propose to impose these heavy taxes if your existence is valued exactly shit by the ruling class?

The middle and upper classes which will pay for it through taxation.

Yes republicans and their ' >muh small gubermint' ruined the USA. Our glory days were the 1950's where we had a highly regulated and taxed economy that helped the lower class make the middle class.

I support campaign finance reform as did the candidate I supported, B Sanders

I believe radical marxist communism is as incompatible with the modern world as full small gov capitalism. We need a mixture that benefits the American people

Yeah, that's pretty typical of here. I incorporate more focus on racism, hatred of women, Islamophobia, etc. as part of my leftism (essentially, that they're capitalist tools) than most Holla Forums posters, but yeah that doesn't exclude you at all. Most people who focus near exclusively on LGBT rights, hatred of women, racism, etc. aren't leftists, and instead well-meaning but ultimately misguided people who don't yet understand the importance of class and that power = wealth = bourgeoisie, or in other words, capitalism is largely at fault for the injustices they're trying to combat. Welcome aboard!

We'll pay for it by melting down the expropriated toothbrushes.

that's where your wrong, kiddo

The same bernie sanders that was fucked over by his own party? :^)

We are not in control pal, read "The Conquest Of Bread" by Peter Kropotkin

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"radical marxism"

[Engels flies in on a skateboard, does a sick 720 spin and dumps the manifesto on your lap]

what?

It's okay, Comrade Jones will lead him onto right path.

Goddammit. I'm Booboo the Fool. I forgot Holla Forums's tongue-in-cheek word filters.

voluntary?

You're a social democrat. People will accuse you of killing Rosa a lot. You should lurk anyway.

This class talk is making me wonder. When did Americans start calling everyone middle class?
Which PR firms are responsible for this stuff?

I already hear the chorus of "taxation is theft. Taxation is rape"

REEEEEEEEEEEEE THEY CANT KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH IT

*ancap voice*

Only through VOLUNTARY SOCIETY will we finally be able to marry our 12 year old sisters, whom we can't believe is THIS cute

Nice argument

Probably something to do with Edward Bernays tbh

So basically you are jelly at the success of others and want to steal from them but you also wanna do mental gymnastics to convince yourself that you are a good person so you call it "wealth redistribution"

What we actually need is the taxation of WEALTH (not income) that does directly to the poor.

This only will solve almost every problem in society.

We NEED to paint this as a RIGHT. The money given aren't a gift, it's just the universally poor's money.

but what about the small business owners?

If it's your right to take other people's money why is it not their right to take your money?

Social democracy is a failure. Taxing porky for your healthcare and education only works for so long until he uses his control of the media to stir people up over blacks, mexicans, muslims etc. and vote their healthcare and education away.

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I was being sarcastic. That is what usually gets shouted our way when someones proposes taxes that hit the rich.

Wealth, liquid wealth (money), not property or the mean of production themselves…

If you are forced to start businesses so you don't have to pay wealth tax, it's a win/win, jobs will flood the market and people will be selective about it.

People deserve to live a respected and livable life. It's their RIGHT.

Taking the porky's money achieve this right, taking the poor's money doesn't.

Like this you can easily let the porky be a porky (greedy) while everyone can have a respectable life.

Op here
what is porky

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yes, but porky eventually works out that people can easily be turned against each other. he creates animosity and convinces people to vote their rights away.

no porky, no problem

The rich, the owners of private property (farms, factories, fast food chains, oil companies, etc.), the 1%, the bourgeoisie, the capitalists, the capitalist class.

Stalin was an oppressive dictator

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They've been doing it since forever.

whats wrong with owning property or business as long as they contribute to society and arent too exploitive

There's a reason iphones are produced in China and not Denmark. The minute unregulated capitalist countries start standing on the toes of another regulated country is the minute those regulations are reversed. There's a reason the US's entire economy infused with Japan's comparative wealth is hidden away in offshore bank accounts, regulation works on a country by country basis but it's still established off the exploitative labour of the third world and is still embedded with the idea of consistent growth.

That's not to say Social Democracy isn't a good step towards something real but it alone isn't a solution for universal worker's emancipation.

Much like the capitalists you claim should control the economy.

also "think of the farmers!!!!"

small business owners are aspiring porkies, nothing more

You for real?

I believe that the government should be the dominant factor but still maintaining small businesses

Yes Im not a marxist I'm a social democrat,
I just want high taxes on rich 1% and good public sector

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It is impossible to achieve revolution without the revolutionary holocaust.

youtube.com/watch?v=9aajXG_pcq0

social democrat =/= liberal

consider that you are asking to 1. tax the rich and 2. allow the rich to maintain their overwhelming influence in society

this doesn't work in the long run

You are saying that as long as it is kept small scale capitalism is not exploitative, correct?

social democrats are reactionaries appropriating leftist language. they most certainly are liberals.

Im saying that theres a need for market competition and capitalism but it needs to be highly modified to benefit the people.

No I want a seperation of state and corporate donors buying influence. I believe in post Keynesian social democracy

what about profits?
taxes take from private investment
investment creates jobs and economic growth

state will be forced to invest directly
power of state will grow → people start bitching about totalitarism

yes, and those donors will use other channels to buy influence: bribery, the press, their power over their workers, and so on and so on

It's the mechanism that drives wealth inequality which leads to porky's minority control of the state.

My bone with this is that capitalism is inherently exploitative, no matter how regulated is. It's the eternal serach for profit that will inevitably ruin any type of social democracy.

True, but it won't be easy for him.

Even with socialism there would be porky-wannabees always. They will convince you to make them a porky… people with power are more likely to be those.

It's just life… you have to deal with it.

We will tax only individuals. If you have money setting around we tax your. As simple as that.

No you will get taxed only a portion of your wealth… not all of it…

This will actually push you to invest all your money so you won't pay the wealth tax. Which means more investments, more economic growth, and quality jobs in the market. Since porky will be more happy to invest and gain nothing that not invest and lost money.

We should abuse the porky's greed, not suppress it.

Yes OP

this is why I'm an anarchist and not an ML

the market economy means that porky still has power over the media by virtue of owning it. porky still employs the workers and has power over them. you absolutely cannot shake off porky's influence over the state.

Sure… Stay people… Stay….
Stay and see how your reformism doesn't work…

…wut

Other folks have already given you a few reasons, so I'll list a few more:

It eliminates democracy in the workplace.

Workers are unable to set their wages according to their need (in a society with money) or ability to freely distribute the product of their labor among themselves and their community as needed

The product of workers' labor is not controlled by the workers themselves but a third-party who owns the land the work is conducted on, the tools it is conducted with, etc.. who, having full control, takes large sums of the output for themself and gives the workers just enough so they come back and work the next die and aren't dead. Workers must either let themselves but subjugated to exploitation by the bourgeoisie or face abject poverty, homelessness, and/or death.

Furthermore, wage-earning workers generate more money for their company in an hour of work than they are paid for an hour of work. It's just not fair. The rich are only rich off the backs of underpaid labor and through price-gouging.

There's also Marx's theory of alienation, and capitalism's effects on families and health (mental and physical)….

Even from a purely selfish standpoint, capitalism is not the most beneficial economic system for most people, and never can be.

Is constant economic growth really desiderable?

We are constantly poisonig ourselves for the sake of this growth. The human species may not make it to the end of the century for this economic growth you speak about.

i was referring to different points of his post

what portion? bonds? options? real estate?

again, you need to collect taxes to maintain infrastructure, healthcare, education
you collect money from rich, they have less to invest, economic growth slows down, free market bitching intensifies

Not only that, a good deal of war and interventionism is done for the sake of strong-arming other nations into the global capitalist economy (as capitalism is dependent upon infinite growth), stifle leftist movement, and/or place valuable natural resources under the control of "friendly" capitalists who will work according to more powerful country's need/desire.

the rich just invest their money abroad and shove the profits in tax havens

the problem really does seem to center around the rich doesn't it

agree. After all the military industrial complex needs fresh wars every once in a while or the stock holders get whiny

and porky is doing his best to convince the masses that growth for the sake of growth has no negative consequences whatsoever

Sadly it's. No one want to live in a 50 years ago world today. If your model wasn't based no growth capitalist countries will get more advanced than you and your people will help of porky will bring back capitalism…

There must be regulations tho…

Same percentage. Only of the money that you have in your pocket. If you have real estate we will tax you from the money you gain from them.

Bonds must be just be illegal or any form of lending money with interest IMO. They just create money out of thin air and devalue the whole people's currency and cause inflation. You are literally getting robbed by banks even if you are not engaging in their shenanigans.

the past 50 years of growth have been in large part due to gains in production efficiency, but we are at the point where more growth is unsustainable.

And that my friend, is called cancer.

Which ironically is the illness that is gaining more and more followers thanks to this constant growth.

economic growth does not mean technological advancement, nor social or scientific stagnation. If a society has enough to sustain itself I see little gain in enforcing a constant growth of its output.

You are right, I should not have used the word "growth".

What about innovation? who would create that new technology?

We will need porky's help with that, we will just stop him from being a full davai porky.

Right, right. I used to wrong word. Wasn't thinking about growth actually.

technological advancement is not tied to monetary gains. How many great scientists or inventors you know died rich?

so profit motive is no good in banking sector?

good ol' quantity theory of money
that proved itself to be false time and time again

anyway, assuming QTM is valid, how is the socialization of banking gonna change the fact that money is fiat?
you need to back money by something finite to prevent creation out of thin air

Innovation will come from people finding ways to decrease the amount of work people must do to sustain society, or at least simplify it or make it less dangerous. Cures to diseases will be found because it is the right and safe thing to do, not because medicine can then be bottled and sold (many diseases are neglected because the market is too small to sell to, to "justify" putting in the resources to study and cure them). Scientists will no longer be punished or deterred from finding new ways to generate energy, whereas now we're reliant on fossil fuels to a fault. People will likely have more time to dedicate to other pursuits as automation takes hold, which can be directed toward science and technology. People will invent new gaming systems and the like because they're fun. The list goes on and on.

Profit is not the only incentive for innovation, and in fact, it in many ways prevents it.

totally not seeing how porky can get around this… nope, totally not seeing

I want to iterate we don't even have to be so reliant on fossil fuels. Clean energy is a go pretty much whenever. We know what to do to get started, except the fossil fuel industry has a stranglehold on the State and the market.

well said.

youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

even the porky agree

if you are not moving forward you are moving backwards

assuming population growth continues we need more and more advanced productive forces to sustain it

Scientists don't hire a bunch of workers, produce, and deliver the good to the people…

There's a good reason for non-property socialism to be the go-to strawman for the right and center to delegitimize the left.

He can get around it by investing. Which is good.

what are you talking about? There is no single way to advance the species. Economic growth is not the only force of innovation and surely not the most efficient one.

So what? We have to work to match the need of society, not growth for the sake of growth.

yea, investing in asian economies where he have tax breaks

porky do not cure illnesses, design new technologies or produce anything, they just collect their part.

you are talking about the growth of GDP
I'm talking about growth of technology and science knowledge

Porky (pharmaceutical industry) won't fund the research if it isn't confident it can get its money back in drug sales. It's not that the scientists themselves don't want to work, it's that porky won't give them the resources scientists need to work because porky doesn't like to gamble.

and when even there the workers manage to get a decent living they will start the process again in another poor country.

and when we run out of poor countries we will exploit the martians I guess.

if all porkies are investing, thus having tax breaks, where do you get money to pay for education and healthcare?

'>implying the normal human would give a rat's ass about the rest

This is a issue have to do with regulation.

Using fossil fuel is a crime, it's killing people in the future, it simply should be illegal. It has nothing to do with capitalism, even in a socialist country the worker may decide to use fossil fuel if it's more n times profitable to them.

Taxing money (with a way higher percentage) before getting out of the country work is the solution.

They do. Greed push them to do.

I agree. The solution is to remove the porky from the equation.

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This clearly makes breathing a crime. Please stop doing so.

It's "divide and conquer", lads. Resist the contrived prejudices pushed by the bourgeoisie.

You may also be emotionally stunted if you can't empathize with people different from yourself or believe most people can't either.

Greed also push them to create artificial illnesses and needs satisfied by their incredible technology. Greed also brings them to constantly create wars all over the globe. Greed brings them to exploit poor countries until they are "out of poverty" just to abandon them soon after.

This is all very efficient as you can see. Innovation is really picking up the pace thanks to the porky.

If that's the case. Every dollar in the country is invested, working as a toilet cleaner must be REALLY REALLY well paying.

Also it's impossible to rich 100% investment, since a lot of porkies will be saving for a yacht, mason, something… they would pay the tax while doing so.

This tax will be applied to regular people too. If you have $10 setting in your bank for a year you will pay the wealth tax for it.

In a world like this you won't pay the wealth tax in your teens and youth when you are in dept, you will do only when you start having extra money.

Lowkey argument…

Well, to be honest the only reason there's wars is that the masses aren't giving a damn about it. We are all morally corrupt.

i mean

that's literally how they're doing it in europe and the US right the fuck now

Empathy is a muscle that needs to be exercised to work properly. If you were told all your life that the "other" is worthless and subhuman empathy won't save him.

There are studies on this. Economy students are less empathic compared to sudents of other faculties for example.

so they convert money into gold or whatever shit is not taxed for border crossing

Everything would be taxed if you wanna get it out.

In my imaginary world money will be coins having a percentage of gold, and any bank is allowed to create money as long is it follow the guidelines.

So no monopoly in money.

Oh this is shit! We are all at fault children… please behave now.

Even if. Even if! we are all "morally corrupt" there are people a lot more corrupt and at fault.

Go somewhere else with this please. Not fucking "everyone has a little bit of guilt", this is the porky way of making you feel involved in their fuckery.

nope
supply and demand, mothafucka

level of wages is formed in class struggle
with automation do you really think there will ever be undersupply of low to medium professional labour?

trickle down economics is bullshit
look at 80s

You pay your taxes to fund wars and just don't care about it?

Your way is the porky's way:

I don't remember signing any paper where I approved any war. I have no control over the government decision to use taxpayer money to fund their fucking wars.

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I meant faggots like you people
This is the actual lie that you've been told. I've lived all my life in a shithole city with way too many immigrants. Cancer which loved its own culture so much that it despised our culture. What bourgeoisie is there that makes me hate them? There isn't, it's those people who care only for themselves. But I'm fine with that, they can care only for themselves in their own countries, and I can care for my people in our own country. Class isn't the only difference between people, that's absolute fucking bullshit.

Empathizing with others is not the same as not being realistic. There are loads of situations in which resources will be scarce and you'll have to choose between you getting one bowl of food so that you'll be strong the next day, or getting half a bowl and sharing the other half. If you always choose the second option, you're in luck, because I'd always sit next to your cuck ass and beg for another half of your bowl whilst eating another for myself.
You're not allied to me. 99% of the world population is not allied to me. They can starve to death for all I care.

Are you retarded?

You are. It's your citizenship that supposedly makes your gov do translate your opinions into actions. Politicians are you representative, they do actions in your name.

The fact that you are getting scammed, doesn't make it any better.

KYS

He is right, serial killers always come from families where abuse is a regular thing. They basically learn that being a piece of shit to other humans is the norm, that it's love.

Nice counterargument fam you really took my by suprise there man, i really have nothing left to say
am i a leftist now?
kill all fossil fuel
kill all breathers
they destroy the future

Oh, I understand it now. This is a Holla Forums "convert" who can't let his racism go, just dress it up in fancier, pseudo-leftist language.

On the issue of culture, you'll find that in most instances, all around the world, people have favorable views of "outsider" people, even if the two groups' governments are fighting each other. If not, it's largely economic or geopolitical irritants that have caused the animosity, or a cultural, ethnic, national, etc. animosity is intentionally created, resurrected, or excited to execute bourgeois orders through.

They don't learn shit, they're serial killers, their brains have been fucked up by constant abuse. You simply cannot compare such cases with everyday society.
Empathy can be conditioned, what you're saying is nothing less than "We need to condition people to think like this, so they'll act how we want to act them to act", which is literal fucking thoughtcontrol. Just be honest about it. I'd do it if I could create a nation like that. You'd do it aswell. Every ideology would do so as their followers are all hypocrites and human in the end.

I will insult my intelligence if I answered you.

It's a lowkey argument because breathing is an essential thing for human life, whereas consuming fossil fuel is not.
I can't believe I had to explain that to you.

Adding on:

Most people are friendly and empathetic, even to those not like themselves. Capitalism uses manufactured bigotries to sustain itself.

For example, in the US, cracking down on immigration forces undocumented immigrants even deeper into the shadows, and thus easier for businesses to exploit. Anti-immigrant, anti-Latino biases are used–allowed to exist and even encouraged–to build public support for porky policies.

yea, you can condition it by, you know, actually changing conditions, ie mod of production

what you propose is some bullshit group therapy

I'm from Holla Forums, but just visiting Holla Forums
Also
No, definitely, I'm clearly a racist who just can't give up his racist ways, that's why I vehemently disagree with a culture and the norms and values that go along with it, because muslims are a race now.
Proof it. Proof that the bourgeois wants me to hate them and that muslims do not by themselves cause friction with Western civilization.
Cultures clash, cultures hate eachothers guts because cultures bring along societal norms. When these norms clash, you'll get hatred. The bourgeoisie doesn't need to do shit for that to happen.

No one advocated for a postmodernist neo-Stalinist state here.
It's just that empathy can be learned, just like lack of empathy.
Sometimes lack of empathy can justified (i.e. toward porkies, who lack empathy themselves), but I don't see a rational reason to hate gays for example.
Alan Turing committed suicide for this shit, while his works allowed us to shitpost on the internet.
You can have an authoritarian stance about it, but I mean, look at all the posts here about reddit right now. It isn't very efficient.

Nowhere has user stated it's about "changing conditions", it's about conditioning, training, using empathy "in the right way". You can't tell me this is about changing the mode of production if you go on and say that we need to teach people not to voice their opinion on someone else because "IT'S NOT EMPATHY IN THE PROPER WAY!!!!" then you're not only just changing the mode of production, you're also forcing others to think like you want them to think.

I meant "an authoritarian stance in regards to prejudice to gays"*

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against gays*, godammit

What is Iran? What is Afganistan? Who made it go fullislam because "they may go with the soviets!"?

Oh! You mean like Muricans started doing it, because puritanism? hmmm…

Then why are they constantly DOING shit for that to happen?

???

I'll agree. I'd kill all communists if I was given the chance, I don't need them in my paradise. I'd kill the jews aswell, for shits and giggles. Most of the gays because they have given rise to gay culture which is an absolute pest

Neither Iran nor Afganistan have brought Moroccans to the Netherlands (my country), but I'll agree it was bourgeosie who brought them over. But it wasn't the bourgeosie who created the friction, they themselves, those muslims, did that. Both are to blame for this disgrace that we have to live with muslims in this country.

A 1/3 of this board are rightists of various stripes who absolutely despise communism that includes turpositionists . So I'd say don't worry about whether or not you belong. That said, most people here don't like succdems and thing reformism is naive (myself included). Just make sure to familiarize yourself with leftist literature and maybe you won't be a fuckin idiot

Still doesn't mean this user advocates authoritarianism.

I'm Dutch faggot, I don't care some Americans got trolled by the jews or some faggot christians to give up their foreskins. Fuck Americans, fuck muslims, fuck jews, they can all get gassed for I care. Hurting a child like that is simply inhuman practice, no one deserves to suffer like that, no baby does, no child does, no human does. The only ones who would practice such barabaric tradition deserve to get wiped out.
Atleast American mutilation rates aren't that high anymore. The same cannot be said for muslims or jews. They deserve the gaschambers.

They definitely fare well with it, creating subversion. You're trying to convince me that the sole reason I hate muslims is because the bourgeosie told me to. All I'm saying is that it was muslims themselves who brought me to that stage,the bourgeosie at most helped, I don't have a problem with that. Cultural relations between Islam and the West should be as bad as fucking possible so the chance of Islam getting btfo'd is at a maximum. The more subversion they create, the better it is. After that, we can kill them.

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communism has killed 100 million people

you'd be a drop in the bucket

apologize

Watch this, reformist:
youtube.com/watch?v=d2-CZQnBRYs

to the idiot bin with you

Technically you're just a socdem, but since youre american its probably as far left you can reasonably be for a start without being an absolute edgelord or 70+ year old fart.

Stick around if you want and see if you like it.

Porky actions in Iran and Afghanistan radicalized Muslims even outside of them.

who decides what is right?
psychology majors and psychiatrists?

that's my problem with psychology fucks
they have no solid basis for their theories in neurophysiology, their "science" still on the level of bloodletting, but they hurry up to sort everyone into categories and feen them some prozac or ritalin until they are literally junkies

same shit as when "doctors" in medieval times gave their patients some mercury

Nice twisting of my words. I said empathy needs to be exercised to work properly. Not that there is a proper way to feel empathy.

You are seeing authoritarianism where there is none. What I meant to say is that empathy is not something we are born with, it is something we develop in our lives.
If we are never given the chance to exercise it, we will never have any.

I said the bourgeoisie uses differences between people to instill hatred and paranoia to justify war, imperialism, and exploitation against the “lesser”, or “dangerous” “out-group”, which it find profitable.

Politicians either encourage or fail to meaningfully act against growing bigotries among their constituents. They often use alarmist language and distort fact to drum up public support of their impending policies. This gets parroted by the media, pundits, and common people until it becomes accepted fact by the majority of the population.

In Chomsky’s (yeah, yeah, yeah) ‘’Media Control’’, he references a study which found , before an American media campaign to whip-up public support for a war, two-thirds of the population was opposed to the idea of warring with whichever country it was at the time. By the end of the campaign, the population had flipped, and now two-thirds supported the war. A third of people absorbed the propaganda, the otherization of some foreign people, and now believed war was the way to solve this perceived danger, and not to worry about the grievous harm it would undoubtedly bring to the civilians, even decades after American withdrawal. I hate that I can’t find the name of the study anymore so if someone knows, please post a link.

You believe you hate Arabs and Muslims for their culture and “uncharacteristically barbaric religion” (if anything, this is a sign you haven’t put the effort in to study either) and interpreted my assertion that because many people hate Muslims, Arabs, and Persians because of bourgeois propaganda, I’m stating that bourgeoisie propaganda makes people subtly (or blatantly) believe them to be less human, less civilized, and fundamentally incompatible with the West and incapable of peace. This diminishes public objection to and encourage public support for the gross abuse of Muslims and Middle Easterners for the economic and hegemonic gains of the bourgeoisie and its proxy, the State.

Porky didn't need to do a whole lot to radicalize those muslims, they merely brought them to power. Stop defending muslims as if they have no blame.

God. That's why religion exists, so that there is an objective standard of norms and values, else society collapses.

Apparently, there exists some entity which determines whenever empathy works properly and how it must be stimulated or 'exercised' in order to work in this proper fashion. I didn't do anything with twisting your words, you did it yourself. All I'm saying is that there is no such entity and that no one can determine how someone else should or should I say must """exercise""" his empathy.
All the empathy we know is either from birth which is purely biological empathy, created through evolution so that we would group instead of being individual or learned through social interactions, but just as empathy is learned through social interactions, so is hatred.
In real life, you'll never breed one without once in a while getting the other, yet you're bringing it as if we can all just learn from eachother and then hold hands and all love eachother and everything will be alright.

also
kek
My country could've set a limit to how many students the psychology studies here can have, they didn't. So instead of having to deal with ~80 students, most uni's are now stuck with ~300 students, because obviously, the psychology market is booming and all those people will definitely get a job :^)

FTFY

Maybe, but it's best to question rather than to accept. Leftists have nice ideas on paper, but it tends to end up authoritarian one way or another.

Peoples, cultures, religions are not “fixed” things that will always remain the same.

Massive amounts of “western” knowledge was preserved by Arab Muslims while white Christians were dicking around struggling to rebuild after the fall of their empire and subsequent “in-fighting” among other European tribes. For example, the Catholic Church forbade studying some of Aristotle’s works for speaking against Christian ideas, such as the idea of a personal god. Muslim religious leaders, on the contrary, declined censorship, though Aristotle posed no less “threat” to Islam. During the European Middle Ages, the Muslim World was a rich cultural and educational center, with several major libraries and universities. Great advances in mathematics, astronomy, and medicine were made by Arab Muslims, among other contributions. Islam (like Christianity, in fact) encourages scientific study, such as in the hadith, “Seek knowledge, even as far as China”. This recommendation is obviously not always heeded, but it’s not like Islam discourages thought and education.

It’s often said Islam was spread by the sword, which is true to an extent, as is the case for most major religions (Christianity has the multiple iterations of the Inquisition, for example, and many of the deadly residential schools in Canada to “re-education” Native American children), but paints the spread of Islam with far too broad a brush. A big part of the “Islamization” of North Africa and Southeast Asia was related to trade and gaining access to knowledge. Rulers and scholars of foreign nations likely converted to get closer to a growing empire they believed would be beneficial to be allied with, or even a part of, and civilians followed suit with the legal and economic incentives offered to converts, although non-Muslims were still more often than not guaranteed decent lives under Muslim rule. It’s evident this was less about religion and more about building a cohesive empire. Every empire does something similar, ancient and modern.

Much of the Quran commands good behavior from its adherents, such as to help the poor, free slaves, and promote freedom of religion and equality among races. It’s not a perfect text and commonly contradicts these statements, but so does the Bible and other holy books. Most modern Christians and Jews look down on the more violent parts of the Bible and to Torah. Likewise, most modern Muslims feel the same about the Quran. That said, people are flawed. Their religions are flawed. But no one group of people is more or less flawed than another.

Lastly, Arabs and Persians are every bit as human as whites, and most want the same basic things as whites, such as peace, acceptance, and equality.

so clergy then?
or do you have personal communication channel with God?

"Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?"

– Friedrich Engels

Capitalism is inherently authoritarian too.

Muslims have co-existed with westerners for centuries. That history has been marked by good and bad times, but once again, this is typical. More recently, Muslims and westerners cohabited in the West through-out the entire 20th century with nary a major problem. If there’s aggression, it is by and large perpetrated by white non-Muslims, the far more powerful group out of misguided hatred and paranoia.

Most Muslims offered their support and sympathy following 9/11, even Muslim governments (even Iran!), some of which also began offering financial and intelligence support to fighting terrorism. (That came with its own issues, but is nonetheless evidence of cooperation and condemnation of violence against non-Muslim, western civilians).

The tensions between the West and the Middle East and related instability and terrorism you see now are born out of nearly a century of Western imperialism, from the Sykes-Picot Agreement and following stages of the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire which quartered the Arab Peninsula for Western consumption, with poor consideration for its long cultural history, to the colonization of Palestine, to the British control of Iran through the Anglo-Iran Oil Company (later to become BP) and subsequent CIA-led coup against democratically elected prime minister Muhammad Mossadegh and support of the dictatorial Shah, the creation of the Taliban and encouragement of Jihadist action to curb Soviet influence in Afghanistan, and the continued alliance with the totalitarian, theocratic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia which exports its extremist interpretation of Islam to spread its influence in the region. This isn’t even going into detail on the Iran-Iraq War, the Iraq War, the gratuitous military action and drone strikes, or the effects of sanctions against countries like Iran and Syria, or the multitude of other Western misdeeds in the Middle East. Are you really that surprised these are a fractured, desperate people? That some of them are distrustful or hateful of the West? That some turn to unhealthy or hurtful ways of coping? that they want to preserve their culture, which the West has waged war on? To be true, most Muslims, Arabs, and Persians mean well, but the bad people, the instability, the tendency to theocracy that you criticize is in no small part a byproduct of Western intervention.

Do you mean they have a fucking accent? Anyone who doesn’t learn a second language as a child will have an accent, even if they work extremely hard to weaken it. They learned a second language. Have you?

This is true, but so do many of Christians, especially in the U.S. and Canada. Even within the Middle East, Muslims and Jews are not the only religious group to circumcize. Middle Eastern Christians and members of tribal religions do it, too. Male circumcision is practiced in some African religions, as well. Of course circumcision is extremely wrong, but Muslims and Jews are not the sole practitioners of it.

Campaigns against female circumcision are new in the Middle East, but have been successful in reducing its rates in the past couple decades as people better understand its effects. This provides hope for future campaigns to end male circumcision among Muslims, and proves they are not incapable of changing their stances on circumcision. (The same is true in African populations, as well.)

This is not some ancient war of cultures, races, or religions. A lot of what you see is new. Muslims, Arabs, and Persians are not bad people and they are not eternally enemies of the West. If you believe this, you are a pawn to both the bourgeoisie and the jihadist.

(God this was so hard to post correctly.)

This study can't be serious. You start off with an uninformed population, of which 2/3 is against a war. After a media campaign, which consists of both information aswell as propaganda, it switches to 2/3 in favour of a war. Claiming that "a third absorbed the propaganda" is idiotic, you have absolutely no idea wether those people were convinced by information or propaganda. Please don't be a retard. This before-after-study doesn't tell shit about anything, it literally tells you nothing at all.

I couldn't care less for their religion. I don't want them to mutilate their children, and if you want to let them do it, you're as bad as they are.

I am completely in favour. The State or rather the People, need an enemy, someone to hate, someone to despise, nothing brings them more together than a common enemy. It's basic human nature.

Tensions between the West and the Islamic world have been around for the last 1000 years mate, we've have had differing norms and values since our foundation.
Cool. Just know that IS has already killed more people in a dozen years than the Inquisitions have done in 300 years.
The inquisition wasn't there to spread christiantiy, it was there to combat the reformation. So yes, christianity was spread by the sword, but not by the inquisition.

What?

Yeah, you're right, we fucked up the Middle-East
I don't care. It was for our profits that we fucked them up, they were the ones that allowed it to happen. They have no one but themselves to blame for their current situation. I'd rather have them lead their lives and us ours, but it might be better to take over their land and opress the fuck out of them. I'm not suprised at Islamic extremism, I know the West plays a role in it, but why should I care? They allowed the West to play a role in their religion and their lands, they deserve everything they got.

I was referring to a stereotypical accent the Moroccans have in the Netherlands, even though they're born here and learn Dutch, they adopt the accent, which some Dutch boys adopt aswell. It's the accent of an anti-establishment (that is anti-dutch in this case) subculture and it's disgusting.

Muslims and Jews mutilate their children universally. U.S. Christians are retards and I don't care for them, their mutilation rates are dropping.
I'm in favour of killing off every inhuman faggot who hurts his child. Except for Africans. They've not yet encountered basic hygiene or even civilization, they can't be held accountable for their deeds, they're just animals doing animal things.

Would be interesting. Female circumcision is culturally determined (Bedouin tribes do it, it's not all that common for most arabs though), however male circumcision is definitely religiously determined, I wouldn't equate those two, you'll end up disappointed.

I can't decide whether or not they're bad people as a whole. Only that their existence within my community has deteriorated social cohesion and mutual trust. I want them out.

Christians nowadays are less inclined to go to church simply put because it's boring. The times when some clergyman comes up, speaks to the group, tells them whatever he wants to say, and fucks off, are waning. Christians want to discuss. Atleast that's the situation as far as I know it in my country. And I consider it a good one. Discussion over how the bible should be interpreted will lessen the influence of mere clergymen and allow the People to have a reasonable influence on how to shape our norms and values, which is okay, because they'll do it whilst being guided by the Bible, which after the reformation, hasn't been all that hardcore anymore. The bible is a reasonable work from which standard norms and values can be determined, which will be done by the cultural influence of the People.

I live there and it fucking sucks my dude.

is this the real life?

again you are interpreting my words as you see fit. You perfectly understood what I wanted to say. Did I write somewhere there should an entity that dictates what to feel and when?

I don't believe in god and neither in ministries of truth. Thank you.

this is exactly what I was saying. The only ponit where we do not agree is the entity of what we inherit and how much we learn in our life.

so what? Did I say we should all live happily ever after. Of course hatred is learned alongside empathy and it should be present too. If we were too spineless to hate our oppressor we would still have slavery.

Did you just for a second considered those people were there because they are actually interested in psychology? University is not a place where you get trained to do a job, it is supposed to be a place of learning.

By the way I do not study psychology, I am an engineering student.

The far right is immune to this I suppose?

No, actually, I didn't. You clearly said that it's a muscle which needed to be exercised to work properly. Empathy is a completely abstract concept of some feel, it cannot work properly. It simply cannot, it works, it does its thing, but in no way can you ever exercise it so that it works properly because unless you define some measure by which you measure this "properly", it's a meaningless word. So I give it meaning by defining some measure by which to measure this "properly", that's why you've kept claiming I'm interpreting your words, but that's because I have to. What is this "proper empathy" you keep claiming exists, and who can determine which form of empathy and whose empathy is "proper"?

I might not either, I don't know, but I'd rather follow some bullshit religion which gives me absolute values, then create a bunch of realitivist values which can indefinitely be realitivised until they're useless.

No, but you were making a point of properly working empathy for some greater goal. I assume as this is leftypol that it has some globalist cause and that the ultimate goal is total inclusion of everyone in everyone's empathy so that everyone cares for everyone. I see that as an impossible goal, with a first cause the fact that hatred will be bred during all those social interactions.

I know that, but learning something, then not finding a job is bad for everyone. They'll study for years, and in the end, they'll be useless to our society. Universities haven't been a place of learning for ages, they're made to create slaves.
I study chemistry by the way.

Definitely not, but atleast I'm not the one saying we should exercise our empathy in order to make it proper. I'm calling for the removal of refugees and every muslim who's mutilated (and their parents, of course) from my country, the difference being that my idea is not nice on paper, it's brutal, it's way more akin to human nature, so I am giving it a higher chance of success.

Ok let's say that it was a poor choice of words on my part or I might brust a vein here trying to go around this.
What I meant to say with "proper empathy" is the original usage of this feeling. The reason why we developed in our evolution: to better function as a society.

I meant to work properly as I have a properly working liver, but you decided I was trying to impose on others some sort of proper way.

I don't even know what you meant

Really? Let's just ignore the rising numbers of suicides and mental diseases. Who needs psychology, they're just quacks anyway.

Also if you don't have a job you are useless to society? An interesting perspective coming from someone from the right, who has plenty of people that do nothing all day and let their money do all the work.

The left is nice? Then I guess you guys don't really mean it when you accuse us of killing a hundred bazillion people… Also brutality and human nature have nothing to do with each other. There is no such thing as human nature, it is shaped by our society just as much as we shape it.

Well great, I'll consider this solved, the real problem is that this didn't help us any further

You either have an objective set of morals, like those from a religion, or a man-made set of subjective morals, which aren't backed by anything except people. This set of subjective morals will reduce itself to nothing through a relativistic process, allowing people to continously challenge and question every principle until your set of morals simply falls apart, this cannot happen as easily with an objective set of morals (people are still subjective creatures so it's bound to happen to a certain degree, but that's not the point here). That's why I'm pro-christianity even though I don't know whether I'm capable of believing in God (I've tried but I just don't know how to do it…)

I blame the deteriorating values of society due to subjectivist/individualist attitudes, if anything your bourgeoisie might've got something to do with that. They're the ones pushing the narrative on how one should behave. I think that allowing for a better balance between Family and Work, and a restoration of traditional values will help giving people a place and purpose, raising families, helping out their community. Work is important, and people who do not perform Work are useless, but I let Work be defined quite broadly. Mothers and fathers are the hardest working members of society, they should be treated as such.
Don't act so agitated fam, psychologists are needed in society, just not in the sheer numbers that we're training them now. They're studying it because they like it, not because they're actually incredibly interested and we're going to end up with 200 Freuds when they get their diploma. There's a difference, because they only like it because it's hip and cool, they didn't go for the education, they didn't go for the job perspective, the didn't go for their future, most of them are just studying it in order to get some diploma, not to get a job or to learn something.

I don't study economics, but my gut feeling tells me to put the central banks under the People's control and get rid of a debt-based economy and interest rates on lending. I definitely do not agree with faggots who abuse the monetary system to get rich.

I'll disagree to that. We definitely shape a part of our human nature, but you can't erase those other parts. You can only build on top of them. That's why you can't shape society in such a way that we lose our brutal ways, they're inherent to our existence and our human nature, we can shape them towards some direction, but we can't cut it loose from ourselves.
I used the word nice vaguely, so that's my fault. It's a nice sounding idea which is seemingly nice aswell (two 'nice''s this time), my idea on the other hand is rather brutal when compared to this nice idea of exercising empathy, but I think that humans are beasts, and love brutality because it's in their nature. That's why my idea will have a higher chance of succes, I imagine.

Also I'll be honest fam, because we might not ever meet again. You're probably a nice guy, sound like a good friend of mine even.

As long as you want to rape women, you're golden.

Hello Reddit

You make an intersting point. I do not agree, but I understand what you mean. I think in the end even religious morals are bound to be modified in time. The christianity of the Roman empire is probably way different from the modern one.

You cannot have morals detached from the historical reality of the moment. That said I understand a shifting set of morals is equally excellent.

I see. Well I do not think people who do not work are not important, not because they are not useles, you are right on that, bu tbecause we are rapidly approaching the point hwere technology will force some of us to go without work. So what do we do? invent jobs for the sake of keeping these people working? Is it really better than having them not working?

You are closer to socialism than you think.

They didn't go for their future because they know there probably isn't a future where they will be successful, so they say "fuck it if things are gonna be bad regardless I'm going to study what I like"

On this we agree.

I agree. We can only build on top, this does not mean we can't considerably change our "nature". Just a few centuries ago slavery was still an accepted part of society, now it would be impossible for anyone to establish a slave state.

Ok, I understand, though I do not agree that empathy and brutality are opposites. Cooperation is after all an integral part of any army and they sure are brutal when it comes to fighting.

Oh don't make me blush! Thanks man. I appreciate a person that does not shy away form discussion. I apologize if I was a little hostile before.