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Tbf a lot of people just want a petty bourgeois vacation.
I’ve been on a socia media break, but I’ll post some memes.
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I’ve seen people defend capitalism unironically by arguing that you can just go run off in the woods if you don’t like it, as if every square inch of land isn’t privately owned.
This is only possible because you can run off into a national park, which is the exact opposite of capitalism.
Except you can and will be kicked out of those too. At least the Great Smokey Mountain National Forest has maximum occupancy times for its campsites, and will haul you to jail if they catch you camping outside off their official sites.
I wouldn’t call a virtue signaling land theft technique antithetical to capitalism.
This statement has always been crazy to me. Even when I wasn’t a Communist I didn’t really understand this, since for the overwhelming majority of human history, we didn’t even have Capitalism… Capitalism is around 400 years old, meanwhile recorded history is around 6000 years old.
And I’m not even applying materialism here, this was when I was a lib lmao
If you question people who say this they will say “sure we didn’t call it capitalism but people were trading and selling to become richer since forever!”. And you try to explain that markets =/= capitalism and you see their eyes glass over and their brains shutdown.
We say libs don’t know anything about communism, but they will die on a hill to defend capitalism and they know nothing about it either.
The burden of marxists is that we understand our opponents positions and our own, but they don’t understand either.
I maintain that Marxists are better at playing the game of capitalism than “capitalists”.
Was reading some of Engels letters about the stock market earlier lol
I mean just look at China. They teach Marxism to everyone and embed Communist Party cadres in every company and they’re eating the first world’s lunch as a result.
Marxists won’t waste as much time and money on fads that won’t create value like NFTs and cryptocurrency either
Agreed.
Libs don’t know what capitalism is, and they haven’t thought it through. “I think there were markets in Rome and markets = capitalism.” “I feel like it’s in my nature to be selfish, so it must have always been like this.”
A big part of the “selfishness is human nature” thought process comes from Puritan brainworms. The Protestant work ethic and the belief that one’s desire to have the basic necessities of life is inherently selfish form the basis of American capitalism, thus the idea that one must be worked beyond their limits in order to simply continue to live becomes baked into the fabric of society.
Basically everything wrong with America is John Calvin’s fault at its source.
People who genuinely believe that have to be misanthropes.
Yeah. People are also just really confused right now, and don’t seem to think through things politically.
I think it also comes down to a lot of them simply not wanting to talk about politics or engaging with political content. Some just feel drained and mistreated by the system and just want to try to live a happy life. The depression epidemic is a real thing
I mean you also can’t escape the abysmal state of political education in this country. My high school government class was mandatory and basically wall to wall propaganda - and then when I took polysci in college I was literally taught “socialism is when the government does stuff”. Most people who don’t have the urge to keep digging and learning about politics are going to end their education about it somewhere between those two classes, having learned nothing.
Oh yeah, political education in the US is oversimplified warmongering dross. And the vilification of anything anti-capitalist that is formed as an organized system is a real problem in the way people get taught politically. Far too many people who will say stuff like “communism sounds nice on paper, but in practice, it was just people pretending to care and then becoming dictators.” Or they’ll say that it’s “idealistic” when the reality is that it’s an obnoxiously scientific exchange between theory and practice and is in opposition to notions of purely “striving to be morally better” as a means of achieving meaningful change.
It’s far too common in the US for people to be terrified of nations they’ve never set foot in and think they know better than entire peoples and cultures they’ve never met because they read a few news headlines that said what the situation is supposedly like.
Oh, definitely. While I don’t live in the US (I’m Portuguese) and we never really touched politics in depth in High School (we talked about it briefly in Philosophy class), I can only imagine what’s like in other countries.
Also, when you start attending high school in Portugal, you can choose between a science course or humanities [is that the right word?] course. I chose the first option, so that might be why I never really had any politics class in high school.
Lastly, for clarification, I was talking mostly about the average person. Most people (at least from what I’ve seen) that aren’t interested in taking polysci in college tend to avoid engaging with political content or talk about it as a whole.
Imagine a world where you do stuff with your neighbors because you like them
i do this, people can do this! lots of americans (mainly the white ones) just suck and are angry at eachother :( but in my mostly mexican neighbourhood, people frequently invite eachother over to parties and things
I spent the holidays last year going to a neighbor’s house, and hanging out in the balcony, with fireworks popping off from the ‘‘cerro’’ behind my home, with beers and loud music, while his boys who’re off in Chicago, were videocalling us from their car, in a parking lot, drinking with us and some Mexican friends of theirs, while looking out for cops. The contrast was just sad.
that’s the way to do it :3
Sorry I was conditioned all my life not to.
Honestly, I’d probably choose something by the ocean. I DO NOT trust the deep woods in the US. I do not want to go out for a morning walk and see myself staring back at me from behind a tree further down the trail or some devious cryptid garbage like that.
Miss me with that.
I’m not into cryptid stuff but I understand the sentiment with American woods. Lord knows how many dangerous people are just wandering around wilderness areas looking for random solo victims, given the USAs serial killer/mass murder numbers and how easy it is to get a gun. And it would impossible to ever find a killer like that.
I love being alone in the woods personally. I walk in the dark every morning. I’ve listened to missing 411 stories, and I feel fine since I’m not a small child.
Just remember to pack pepper spray and bear spray
Honestly, the bear spray will work just fine if you forget the pepper spray. The inverse is not true.
Better off using the pepper spray on yourself in that instance, give some seasoning to the bear’s next meal.
Same. Like, what are the chances two psychopaths will be in that specific part of the woods, right?
I’m the “thing in the swamp” people should be afraid of
It depends where you go. There are mountain lions in some parts as well. Coyotes and wolves are carnivores as well. Carnivores generally don’t go for dangerous prey unless there is nothing else to eat. Just get yourself high enough in the trees where the bears and coyotes can’t reach you when you are sleeping. If you are with a group of people closeby, they have enough sense to know that messing with one of you is a death sentence.
To be fair, climbing up in trees isn’t gonna save you from a bear.
It will. Depends what type of bear though.
A grizzly? Their fat butts slowly climb at a glacial pace. A black bear? No climbing as they are Olympic class climbers, but you stand, make yourself big, and “fight” as they are cowards and are terrified by confrontation.
A polar bear? Lmao, get ready to die.
A grizzly will just knock the tree down if it can’t climb to you.
Climbing a tree is delaying the inevitable with most animals. If they have decided to eat you and can’t reach you, they just wait.
What kind of small sad trees are you climbing?
A grizzly is never knocking the down a bog standard regular oak tree.
Lots of pines where I live. The oak trees aren’t native to the region.
Ah makes sense. But still, most US forests are comprised of Oak, Ash, Maple, Elm, etc. All trees that wouldn’t even feel a bear crashing into them at max speed.
But still, unless the tree is fairly young, I genuinely feel like any pine that could carry a humans weight could easily shrug off a bear pushing on it.
Plus Grizzlys aren’t some psychopathic hunters. Even if they could push over the tree with enough time and effort, or even climb it since grizzilys can also climb (albeit much slower then black bears), they are opportunistic hunters and would probably deem the entire process a waste of effort and lose interest in most cases.
The vast majority of bear attacks are also because a parent feels that their cubs are threatened, so if the bear feels safe again it will most likely pull back.
This is also a worst case scenario. Either the bear is near death and can’t find other prey, or you realllllllllly pissed it off, both scenarios that are pretty rare.
Same but also living in the woods is so much cheaper you gotta have “rich parents money” to afford a place by the sea.
Not really. Coastline is very cheap with how much of it there is, and I don’t need to be in a resort town or in the tropics. A sleepy fishing town would be more then enough for me.
I guess it’s highly regional. My whole adult life I’ve basically been getting forced further and further inland by my rent rising faster than my pay, but this is in California.
And it’s usually the same people that make appeals to nature wherever they can, not just when defending capitalism. Funny how easily they contradict themselves
I mean yeah, I p much just by default despise the majority of the country. Would leave it in my rear-view if I made enough money to even be able to save to immigrate. I see no profit in saving the anglos.
It seems like the petit bourgeois in my life all talk like this. I really like people and want them around me.
Of course the people like this want to relax on the beach and have people bring them food and drinks all day. They don’t really want to do the survival thing.
The settler dream remains the same, 40 acres, a cleared lawn and no people around.
It is no shock that the number one complaint in our settler state by the proles is that they can no longer afford to own stolen land. Bribe us, they beg, we need our treats!
I feel uneasy when they speak of these dreams, even among my friends. I do not care to own a home, or land. I do not dream of being a landlord.
How can one possibly solve this issue? How does one change the hearts and minds of the settler? How do you make them see that the alternative - community, is better than material isolation? I do not know.
Call me reductive but I’m starting to think you genuinely can’t. It will need to die a slow and drawn-out death of ideology, if anything. Nothing else seems to be working, not even threats of annihilation on multiple vectors at scales beyond anything in living memory. Terrifying to grapple with.
If we can’t, then we’ve already failed. You mentioned climate change in your response, so you should know that U.S. imperialism is the biggest driving factor in it. And if you know about that, then you probably know that they’ve given us basically until 2030, at the very best, to keep the temperature of the planet from hitting 2 degrees Celsius. Because we’re already at 1.6 degrees Celsius in temperature rise. And I don’t know about you, man, but I don’t want to live in a world where the polar bears and the elephants and the tigers are all extinct, because we didn’t have the nuts to do what needed to be done. I mean, Lenin already told us what needs to be done, but every time we try to do that shit, well, see Fred Hampton… And so I’m just, I don’t know, maybe I’m the crazy one in Omelas.
I mean, we’re already at the point as a country where the murder of children is acceptable so long as those children meet certain qualifications, like, do they live in Gaza? Are they Muslim? Are they brown? If so, murder away. So we’re already at the place where human life has no intrinsic value.
What’s disturbing to me is I know this is only going to continue to get worse, and there is absolutely zero chance that things ever get better within my lifetime.
Every day, I go to the convenience store, and I get an energy drink, or maybe a pack of wraps if I got some weed. And you know what II see? every day, dozens of people. Sometimes they’ll be lined up, getting scratch-off tickets. You know what the odds on those scratch-off tickets are? Not very good. But they play anyway. So that should be our logic. The odds aren’t very good, but we gotta play anyway. Because you can’t fucking win if you don’t play.
How can one possibly solve this issue?
Century of humiliation
Long enough for future generations to forget what it means to be a settler
In the mean time carve out pockets of power with other non-settlers and do what we can wrt international solidarity.
How do you make them see that the alternative - community, is better than material isolation?
I think they’d need to see how community is elsewhere- outside the west- to understand. Because there are so many reasons why material isolation would be absolutely preferable over settler-colonial community to most people regardless of ideology.
Community, and society at large, can be an empowering thing, something that betters peoples’ lives. It can be a force for harmony and equality rather than racism, alienation, and all sorts of societal divisions. It can be a source of belonging, fulfillment, heritage and culture, etc. This is too often not the case, particularly in the settler-colonial neoliberal societies of the west.
Everything you said is valid, but within this society (and most) home ownership is stability. Rural home and land ownership in settler-colonial countries (or worse, landlordism) is another matter entirely, but home ownership is a metric that many communist and formerly communist countries, China included, are testaments to the importance of. And by “community”- well, there is community, but one has to seek out their own decent spaces here. The mainstream society here in Canada frankly, increasingly disgusts, horrifies, and terrifies me, especially as someone who is a racial minority and a communist. In such a environment, seeking to isolate oneself makes complete sense, though the preferable thing would of course be leaving altogether.
This is a certified Stardew Valley moment
Reminds me of that quote, IIRC from Capitalist Realism, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” The way it’s ingrained in some people goes very deep. When their view is that it’s capitalism or nothing, it sort of makes sense their only view of an alternative is running away from it rather than confronting it.
People operating on that medieval peasant right of kings mindset is bleak
