Original Post:
I asked, concisely and simply, what was being hidden from us. Most of them just berated me, one user claimed the Syria conflict to which I provided a link to a recent UN Statement on which quite accurately reflected the conflict start to finish. Another user claimed that the recently declassified Nixon era documents about the Chilean revolution and coup, but I was able to find a 1973 archived Newspaper accusing the Nixon Admin of having a hand in it from Times Magazine meaning it was already a mainstream theory at the time.
I am not a tankie, but I can help you out - there are many many examples of this
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Some journalists will call any policy even slightly to the left of neoliberalism “socialist”. This is done because the red scare taught Americans that socialism and communism are evil ideologies, despite Capitalism having a much higher death count - think of all the kids dying mining conflict minerals for our iPhones in Africa.
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In mainstream press, criticism is focused on individuals and policies, rather than the system itself. In any kind of financial crisis, there is never much mainstream media coverage suggesting that capitalism itself is at fault, it’s always little cracks in the system. There are always going to be more cracks because it is a deeply flawed system.
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The media often refers to the democrats as “left wing”, despite democrats being very decidedly right wing. This serves capital by shifting the overton window and preventing people realizing there is no left wing alternative in the United States.
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Any economic policies which acknowledges the reality, that taxes being spent on things like healthcare and education are always a net benefit to the economy, are dismissed as somehow delusional or wrong. In the mainstream press, the national budget is treated as being like a household budget, which it clearly isn’t.
The mainstream media is owned by billionaires. Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, The Times (UK) are all owned by the Murdoch family. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. The LA Times, the Atlantic, Time Magazine, the Boston Globe, are all owned by billionaires. It’s obvious that it is in their best interests to mislead us into thinking that capitalism is the best system.
The media often refers to the democrats as “left wing”, despite democrats being very decidedly right wing.
Nope, they’re a big tent party with centrist & leftist factions. Divisions between factions clearly show up in their voting patterns.
The leftist modern liberal & progressive factions & their caucuses have been a major part of the Democratic party since the New Deal, and their influences trace back to the late 19th century in US politics.
Britannica summarizes the 19th century emergence of modern liberalism to address broader social & economic obstacles to equal access & liberty than the classical liberal focus on excesses of government power.
liberalism, political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics. Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others, but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty.
- Classical liberalism: minimal government to eliminate traditional obstacles to individual freedom
- Modern liberalism: positive government intervention to address social & economic inequalities in the cause of individual freedom
I find it pretty ironic that you claim the democrats have leftist factions when there is not a single anti-capitalist senator or congressperson. You are a victim of the propaganda in the media, here arguing with me that the media isn’t pushing propaganda. I guess it was effective.
I am not here to debate anyone, I am only here because I wanted to answer a simple question which seemed to me, to be asked genuinely. If you have any doubts about capitalism, I will gladly discuss them with you, but if you’re certain that it’s wonderful, I won’t waste any further time with that - but have a great day regardless.
I find it pretty ironic
You are a victim of the propaganda
I guess it was effective.
Yep, facts are “ironic” to someone who doesn’t let evidence interfere with their opinions.
You are a victim of ignorance & denialism of conventional political science, history, widely reported facts.
Your ignorance is effective at convincing yourself.
It doesn’t seem you followed any of the links clearly showing leftist factions in the party exist, their positive government intervention policies (social safety nets, investment in public services, economic controls) in pursuit of a fairer, more egalitarian society, or their criticisms of social & economic inequities including from underregulated capitalism. You seem to ignore criticism of capitalism & the US economy in the news from leftist democrats urging better regulation & public interventions: AOC, Warren, etc.
not a single anti-capitalist
Not the definition or a requirement of leftism. Leftism is the pursuit of social & political equality and egalitarianism.
That modern liberalism is leftist follows from definitions & straightforward logic. Political scientists recognize leftist liberals
Political scientists and other analysts usually regard the left as including anarchists, communists, socialists, democratic socialists, social democrats, left-libertarians, progressives, and social liberals.
Many of these ideologies accept regulated market capitalism in a mixed economy.
I am not here to debate anyone
Too bad: you shouldn’t expect your falsehoods to go unchallenged. Contrary to your flat-out wrong opinion contradicting conventional political science, history, & widely reported information, the Democratic party includes a major leftist faction often followed in the news.
Anti-capitalism doesn’t mean proposing reforms or social policies. It means proposing the abolition of capitalism. The fact that you think any of this liberal/social democrat garbage is “leftist” is my entire point. True leftists want to end capitalism. You will think of that as an “extreme left” position, but for people not sheltered by your media ecosystem, it’s just leftist. Your “left” only at very best reaches juuuust left of centre.
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Example, please
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In a capitalist financial crisis you receive news about who is at fault. In an authoritarian state owned financial crisis you don’t receive that news because the authoritarian state run media wouldn’t blame themselves.
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Democrats are left wing, every policy stance they hold is progressive barring some foreign affairs politics.
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There are countless, literally countless, articles and studies talking about the beneficial aspects of social programs in addition to aversion of suffering.
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Two things are happening, I think:
- It’s not anymore, but the cartoon when it was printed was pretty accurate. Before the internet, it used to be functionally impossible to run across anyone who had any kind of platform anywhere in the US who thought that universal health care was a good idea, or that Israel was anyone other than the good guys, or that publicly funded elections would fix 85% of our problems. Or that global warming was a problem. The magnitude of the catastrophe-on-purpose that resulted from that distorted media is still with us to this day. It’s why we still don’t have a functioning health care system, for example, because everyone in Washington’s picture of the world froze in around 1995 when their brains reached the age where they stop making new worldviews. I actually don’t think it’s fair to blame that on capitalism specifically, since powerful people seizing the methods of media and distorting them to prevent the people from figuring out what’s going on is a pretty universal problem in any economic system, but it is certainly accurate and in the US it takes the forms of capitalism (and is still going on today, just in a different form; it’s why no one published the whistleblower’s warning about the US invading Venezuela for example.)
- What the .ml contingent means by posting that is that the capitalist press is hiding the truth that Ukraine started the Ukraine war, that Biden was the biggest threat to world peace and it was therefore important not to vote for Kamala, and so on. They’re adopting a time-honored very effective propaganda technique of reversing the roles, and then screaming the role-reversed framing of reality with so much vigor that it’s hard for anyone within the bubble to point out that the truth they claim is being censored is readily available to literally everyone, and that they are the ones constantly banning people who don’t agree with their carefully curated worldview. Because EVERYONE KNOWS and then they get an inch away from your face and start aggressively repeating what it is that everyone knows.
Nonsense. There was a free press that freely discussed all the topics you mentioned. It’s true that the mainstream was pretty supportive of the status quo but even there you’d find, for instance, plenty of warnings of climate change and open discussions about it.
Noam Chomsky wrote a bunch of books about the free press’s coverage of geopolitical issues and one of his biggest points of emphasis was how the whole spectrum of permissible debate was basically indistinguishable. That’s why I used Israel as one example.
I think you’d be hard pressed to find even a single newspaper article in the run-up to 2000 that was willing to simply say plainly that Al Gore was objectively right about climate change and what a fucking emergency it was, for example. It was always represented as a “debate” and his absolutely voice-in-the-wilderness diagnosis was a “viewpoint.” He had to make a whole movie of his own to be able to speak plainly about what was going on, because literally no one in the news was explaining what needed to be explained about it. And that was all after counterculture news started to get a little bit of early traction on the internet and puncture the monopoly a little bit.
It is almost impossible for people who grew up post-internet to grasp how constrained the news in the pre-internet era was. It sounds like we’re making it up, like of course it couldn’t have been like that.
You mean the guy who was all buddy buddy with Epstein? Well, in that case it must be true, of course.
