No thanks. No way would I ever tolerate a government that would hold me prisoner.

Broken clocks are right twice daily

You tolerate this one

<:teehee:381917632359563264>

Nothing's stopping anybody leaving the US.

People leave here all the time.

Lol.

I've seen the frog alot, What does it mean?

@sigruna14 I'm still undecided if I would actually support that policy in real life but I definitely see the merits. Which is why I said "kinda"

Yeah. I'm neither a communist, nor even a socialist, but I have to say that I struggle not to say that I'd rather live in circa October '89 East Germany than a minority-White U.S...

@Jacob Best to make a country nobody would want to leave rather than hold your own citizens prisoner.

Another way to look at it is it's like forcing parents to take care of their children. It's not really holding you prisoner, it's forcing you to be a good citizen and fulfill your obligation to your people to repay your ancestors.

That said, I oppose emigration controls, but I was just alluding to the relative importance of demographics vs. economic minutia.

@Wilhelm You are lucky, you obviously don't watch TV or spend much time online.

I try not to

@Nemets In hindsight, maybe. A hard call to make, but definitely an argument I'd be willing to entertain.

Both were devoid of organic spirituality, but the East had more organic social cohesion.

...which is ironic, considering that 500,000 or so East Germans were on the Stasi informant rolls.

I've talked to my mom about that

She said a big difference under communism is that they didn't have the same culture of chasing after money we have today

Communism is a complete failure it's end product is only starvation and death.

Yeah, there was more in the way of solidarity, partial due to being indoctrinated into it, but mostly due to the need to cooperate in order to compensate for the shortcomings of their respective economic systems.

Seek... a third way....

@Wilhelm That's not really true. Communism was a failure, but the idea that the typical person in the Eastern block was just starving is inaccurate.

Well, I wouldn’t say he’s too far off since a single communist regime literally starved millions of people to death

I'm talking world wide. It is a Jewish idea in order to subvert the west. It does not recognize human nature.

Our enemies are pushing the worst hybrid of left (social control, degeneracy, open borders, and police state) with the wort aspects of right (corporate rule, widespread poverty, environmental damage, military imperialism)
We must devise a hybrid of the best aspects of the old left and old right to combat.

@Bjorn - MD No, socialism definitely has some benefits towards social life. If properly implemented, you don't have to worry about working 40 hours and starving while your corporate boss gets rich, and mothers can actually take care of their children instead of working all day.

@Jacob Not starving, but malnourished. After their victory over Iraqi armored forces in the Gulf War, American tankers disembarked from their Abrams and M60s to hop into the Iraqi Army's Soviet-exported T-72s to take a look, and were shocked to find that many of them couldn't fit, because the average Russian was about six inches shorter than his White American counterpart, and underweight, due to not having access to enough food during their formative years. Since the fall of the USSR, even with strictly organic agriculture, every successive generation of Russian children has been taller and heavier than the last.

Like NoKo vs SoKo heights/weights

@Bjorn - MD Were these soldiers?

American soldiers in Kuwait, but the Iraqi hardware was built to Soviet specs.

@NITRODUBS Communist regimes were run by bad people, but there are some merits to socialist policies. No one here is defending literal bolsheviks.

Capitalism is so much more moral and superior in nearly every way..

@Jacob I'm definitely reconsidering some of my preconceptions, but I also worry that part of what made Europe, and now us so soft and vulnerable is the kind of mentality created by the welfare state...

Ehhh that’s where I have to disagree. Valuing personal profit over the success of your community isn’t very moral

Communism and international capitalism are both pretty bad

@Wilhelm Look who's financing the left. It isn't hippies living in eco-villages....

One of my earliest realizations that jolted me this way was the realization that we couldn’t have certain nice left things (like single payer healthcare and functioning public infrastructure) since so much of our money is going to fund the third world daycare state.

Both communism and capitalism are immoral. Whatever precedes the -ism is implicitly what's considered most important. As a nationalist, I can be neither a capitalist nor a communist, because as the word "nationalist" implies, what's most important to me, beyond the more specific context of my kith and kin, is my nation.

at least international capitalism has lifted the masses out of extreme poverty. ideal? no, but even severely flawed capitalism is better than communism