I am live.
Disregard my previous comment if you can still see it.
You are intellectually dishonest, willfully ignorant, and apparently incapable of engaging with anything I actually said. Responding with incoherent babble instead of addressing the argument isn’t a discussion it’s a waste of my time.
Good day.
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Because it is defensible. Capitalism isn’t a living entity that personally insulted you or wronged your family. It doesn’t have intentions, feelings, or a moral compass. It is an economic system. The people operating within that system are the ones capable of abusing it, exploiting it, or using it to enrich themselves at someone else’s expense.
And yes, capitalism has historically produced better outcomes than many of the alternative economic systems we’ve actually attempted. That’s not a defense of every aspect of capitalism; it’s a statement of historical fact. You don’t get to dismiss an empirical observation simply because you dislike the conclusion.
What I find particularly amusing is how you people seem to think that confidently declaring something makes it an argument. You haven’t actually refuted anything I’ve said. You haven’t provided evidence, addressed the historical record, or even engaged with the distinction between an economic system and the people abusing it. You’ve simply produced a handful of indignant declarations, apparently mistaking the intensity of your feelings for the strength of your argument. That’s not analysis. That’s ideological ventriloquism with the critical-thinking portion conveniently removed. If you want to disagree with me, by all means bring an argument. But if all you’ve got is “capitalism bad” repeated with increasing levels of outrage, you’re not actually contributing anything to the discussion.
First of all, thank you. Your response was well-mannered and thoughtful, which puts it several multitudes above the usual riffraff on this platform who encounter criticism of a belief they hold and immediately start foaming at the mouth.
Let me be perfectly clear about what I am arguing against: the wholesale slaughter of an entire group of people.
That is not revolution. That is not justice. That is not liberation. It is simply another form of barbarism, dressed up in whatever ideological language makes the person committing it feel righteous.
Human history is littered with the corpses of people who were convinced that this time the mass killing was justified because their victims were the right people to hate. It has never ended well. One hatred does not magically become virtuous because you attach a political theory to it.
There is already more than enough hatred in this world.
And no, I am not opposed to violence in every conceivable circumstance. There are political leaders in the Middle East and Russia whom I would have very little sympathy for if they were violently removed from power. There are people who commit such extraordinary acts of cruelty that I have no moral objection to the idea that they should face the ultimate consequence.
I can even understand the moral argument behind what Luigi Mangione did, regardless of where someone ultimately draws the legal or ethical line.
But there is an enormous difference between saying some individuals have forfeited their moral claim to our sympathy and saying an entire class of human beings deserves to die.
That distinction matters.
I understand why people are angry. I understand the plight of people being crushed by the economic and political systems we have constructed. I understand the desire to smash a system that appears fundamentally indifferent to the people trapped beneath it.
And I am not even particularly enthusiastic about capitalism. I see its failures. I see its contradictions. I see the suffering it can produce and the ways in which wealth and power concentrate themselves.
But here’s where I draw the fucking line:
“Kill the capitalists.”
No.
Because the moment your solution to oppression becomes finding another category of human beings to exterminate, you haven’t transcended the system you despise. You’ve simply inherited its worst characteristics.
You have become the thing you claim to be fighting.
And that’s the part nobody seems to want to hear.
If your revolution requires you to dehumanize an entire population before you can justify killing them, then congratulations, you haven’t built a better ideology. You’ve just found a new excuse for the oldest human vice imaginable.
We have to be better.
Someone has to be willing to say the quiet part out loud: killing people because they belong to the wrong class does not make us morally superior to the people we condemn for doing the same thing to someone else.
You don’t get moral absolution simply because your victims are different from theirs.
If the only thing separating your politics from the atrocities of the past is that you have chosen a different group of people to hate, then you haven’t learned a damn thing from history.
You’ve just changed the uniforms.
I stopped myself initially from looking but then looked anyway because my self-control is bullshit.
Yes. And I think it’s important to understand exactly what a convection oven actually is.
At its most basic, it’s an oven with a heating element and a fan that circulates hot air around the cooking chamber. That’s it. The circulating air improves heat transfer and helps food cook and brown more evenly.
Now, manufacturers have increasingly started calling a particular implementation of convection an “air fryer” and charging a premium for it, as though they’ve invented an entirely new cooking technology. They haven’t. Convection cooking has been around for decades.
An air fryer is essentially a compact, highly optimized convection oven: hot air is circulated rapidly around the food, usually with a basket or perforated tray that allows that air to contact more of the food’s surface.
So when you’re shopping for a range and you see one advertised as having an “Air Fry” function, don’t automatically assume you’re getting some revolutionary new appliance. In many cases, you’re paying extra for a marketing term applied to a convection system that has existed for generations.
I have no clue what the hell you’re talking about.
And as for the people who say they didn’t read it because it was “too long”, my personal favorite, I can tell them to go fuck themselves. They’re among the most useless and intellectually incurious people in any demographic, and their refusal to engage with something simply because it requires more than a few seconds of their attention makes them eminently dismissible.
You’re making a prediction about a hypothetical future and presenting it as though it disproves a statement about the historical present. It doesn’t.
Yes, climate change, resource scarcity, geopolitical competition, and environmental degradation create serious risks. Nobody is disputing that. But “therefore humanity is gearing up for an enormous war” is a prediction, not an established fact. There is no evidence that some inevitable apocalyptic conflict is waiting for us around the corner.
And the capitalism argument is just as selective. I’m not claiming capitalism single-handedly created modern prosperity. Technology, science, medicine, education, infrastructure, and countless other factors obviously contributed. But pretending that economic systems have nothing to do with how those advancements are financed, produced, distributed, and adopted is equally ahistorical.
More importantly, you seem to have conveniently ignored the enormous number of countries that are both capitalist and extraordinarily successful. Countries such as Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, Canada, Japan, and South Korea aren’t prosperous because they somehow escaped capitalism. They have different varieties of capitalist economies combined with different levels of taxation, regulation, social welfare, labor protections, and public investment.
That’s actually the interesting question: not “capitalism good” or “capitalism bad,” but which institutions produce the best outcomes and under what circumstances.
And yes, Western economic exploitation and economic warfare have contributed to poverty in some countries. That’s a legitimate historical argument. But “this country is poor because the West exploited it” cannot simply become a universal explanation for every impoverished country that doesn’t fit your preferred narrative.
Ultimately, you’re replacing one simplistic historical explanation with another. Capitalism doesn’t deserve sole credit for human progress, but neither can its critics simply remove it from the history of that progress because it complicates the argument.
And the accusation that I’m somehow a “capitalism fanboy” is particularly lazy, considering I explicitly stated that I do not outright support capitalism. You are arguing against a position I never expressed because it’s considerably easier than engaging with what I actually said. Recognizing that capitalism has contributed to economic growth, technological development, and improvements in living standards is not the same thing as worshipping the system or believing it is inherently good. If your argument requires you to invent my position before you can attack it, that’s not a particularly strong argument.
If you must know I support social democracy and further down the line democratic socialism.
You’re an idiot.
Ya. There’s always one of you. Don’t read it. I’m not going to force you to do anything. But thanks for wasting your time by telling me you wont read it.
But I’ll still leave you with my default response to this: go fuck yourself.
No it’s not. Advocating for the wholesale slaughter of an entire group of people is morally reprehensible on every level.
you are not required to read my comment if you believe it to be too long. Please feel free to skim passed it. You have no responsibility to engage or even agree with me but if you are one of the lazy fucks that thinks themselves clever by leaving a comment: too long didn’t read - let me go ahead and simply respond to you here: go fuck yourself. There now you don’t have to leave any comment.
“And replace them with socialists, right?”
“Kill the capitalists.” What an absolutely deranged thing to chant as though it were some kind of political slogan worth celebrating. Apparently we’ve reached a point where people can casually advocate killing an entire class of people and then congratulate themselves for being morally enlightened.
For all the advancements humanity has made in medicine, philosophy, science, and morality, we still manage to say incredibly stupid shit like this and other people cheer it on because they seem to have forgotten what the word kill actually means.
And before anyone starts: no, capitalism is not perfect. Of course it isn’t. But pretending that capitalism has produced nothing but misery requires ignoring an enormous amount of history.
We are living through one of the most prosperous and peaceful periods in human history. The countries that consistently rank among the world’s most prosperous, stable, and livable are overwhelmingly capitalist economies. Germany is capitalist. Sweden is capitalist. Norway is capitalist. Denmark is capitalist. They have extensive welfare programs, strong labor protections, and social safety nets, but they are still capitalist economies.
Even the United States, despite its very real problems, remains one of the wealthiest and most prosperous countries on Earth. You don’t have to like that fact, but disliking it doesn’t make it untrue.
There is nothing inherently virtuous about hating an economic class. There is certainly nothing virtuous about fantasizing about killing people because of the economic system they support.
“Kill the capitalists” isn’t a serious political argument. It is virtue signaling dressed up as revolutionary rhetoric, a way for people to feel morally superior without having to articulate an actual solution to the problems they’re angry about.
If your political philosophy requires you to start by deciding which group of human beings deserves to die, perhaps the problem isn’t capitalism.
Disclaimer: None of this should be interpreted as me claiming that capitalism is some flawless or inherently virtuous economic system. I fully acknowledge its massive faults, including exploitation, wealth concentration, monopolistic behavior, and the increasingly corporatocratic nature of the United States. I simply reject socialism as an economic model and don’t believe that acknowledging capitalism’s failures requires pretending that socialism is the answer. You can criticize capitalism and we absolutely should without advocating for its abolition or fantasizing about killing the people who participate in it.
Additional disclaimer: I am not oblivious to the violence happening around the world right now. I am fully aware of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the massive war between Russia and Ukraine, the conflict involving Iran, and the numerous wars, insurgencies, and other forms of violence occurring across Africa and elsewhere. None of that should be minimized or dismissed. My point is a comparative historical one: even with these horrific conflicts occurring today, humanity as a whole is still living through one of the least violent and most peaceful periods in recorded history when measured against the enormous scale of human history and global population. That does not make today’s suffering any less horrific, nor does it excuse any of it. It simply puts the present into its proper historical context.
Edit: You know what the funny thing is? I completely understand why people support what Luigi Mangione did. I consider the executives responsible for so much of the American healthcare system to be among the most reprehensible and morally bankrupt people on the planet. There is certainly an argument to be made that some of them have caused so much harm that they deserve to die. I won’t pretend that argument doesn’t exist. But that’s precisely where I have a problem with what happened. If we resort to their tactics, deciding that human lives are expendable when someone has caused enough harm, then we’ve adopted the very logic we’re condemning. We should be better than that. What I find genuinely disheartening is how many people seem to believe that killing another group of people is perfectly acceptable simply because they believe that group deserves it. Apparently, we’ve moved beyond MAGA and its dehumanizing rhetoric and finally achieved enlightenment: now we’re just deciding who is morally acceptable to kill.
Humans have some of the most impressive endurance capabilities of any animal on the planet, particularly when it comes to long-distance running.
Take a cheetah, for example. It can reach roughly 60–70 mph, but it can only sustain that kind of sprint for a matter of seconds before it overheats and has to stop. A human obviously can’t come remotely close to that speed, but we can keep running for hours, especially in hot conditions where many other mammals are forced to slow down or stop.
That endurance would have been an enormous advantage for a hunter. Combine it with human-level intelligence, cooperation, communication, and the ability to track prey over long distances, and you end up with what is essentially a soft, squishy killing machine that just keeps coming.
You don’t have to be the fastest animal if you can simply keep following your prey until it can’t run anymore.
I disagree. Dr. Pepper is delicious!
Yes. Thank you.
It’s the publishers.
Even Russia’s like: sure don’t care.
I feel kinda weird about that particular picture being used as a meme… This was when bush was told about 911.
I don’t know… Seems kinda… Insensitive.
Yes you do. Clearly you do. Since you think I’m a fascist or liberal words I have no doubt you don’t know the meaning of and have been responding to me steadily.
Let me ask you a question are you stupid?