The lib argument is literally that the child crushing is going to happen either way, so might as well choose the polite one. It’s a philosophy of utter defeatism for a working class person to have.

Yeah, if we were in 1910’s Russia there wouldn’t be a massive population to point to as communists as reinforcement, but it wouldn’t make them any less correct for being communists. All ideologies start out as a minority. Liberalism was also a minority when it was first emerging but it still became the dominant ideology.

To try to steelman the point in the meme though, there is probably some value to seeing that 90 million people support something and then looking into it to see if there’s anything valid there. It should raise some concern that you could be wrong, but it doesn’t mean you are.

Man famous for acting like a child on TV who was paid with public funds condemns people for taking public funds when they actually need it.

the ladies go crazy for his lectures on Babylonian political philosophy

I remember having some general concept of power and money corrupting, and people in power furthering their own interests when I was a liberal. “Corruption” is this weird word that they use to cover up the system being inherently opposed to the working class by making it seem like it’s just a few bad apples doing it. So you go on just thinking that if you can only get a good apple in power then good things can happen because it’s the people who have been corrupted, not the system.

I think it’s one of those things where you need to already be there ideologically to get it. If you just bring some liberal in here, their internal red scare propaganda alarm is going to go ballistic and all they’ll see is just crazy take after crazy take. Sounds cliche but they need to do some reading or learning first so they can understand why we support AES, why Stalin wasn’t as bad as they say, the importance of the class character of the state, the economic strangling of the USSR by the west, difference between bourgeois and proletarian democracy, etc. If they aren’t interested in learning about those things or find it too boring or are too ideologically opposed to even consider them, then I’m not sure this person is ready to dive into these topics in a serious way yet.

What if we took it to the extreme, instead of just having our own flooring, what if we also had our own walls, ceiling, plumbing, etc? Like, imagine a sort of large box that we put on a piece of land with all the parts pre-assembled and already in there? Not sure what to call it. Then we own that and live in it, instead of walking around with pieces of floor tiling to reinstall in another place owned by someone else. Just a thought

If you look at the other sales on Abebooks they are often signed, same with Amazon. So what happens is, the first person who made that post saw a signed 90+ year old first edition, and posted it for like 1000 dollars. It doesn’t really matter what it’s actually worth, this is a common strategy in online posting to extract as much profit. So then the next people coming to upload see the original posting of like 1000, they see that it’s crazy overpriced so they might lower it 100 or 200, but even then it’s still 800. This goes on and 30 postings later the price is still high at 200 because it started high. If there’s not enough volume then it will likely stay high, as is likely the case with this book which is exceedingly rare.

Socialist books in general outside of bourgeois translations of Marx and Engels are incredibly rare in the west and censorship of anything potentially pro-soviet during the cold war was a very real thing

This would require them being not completely paranoid about the poors stealing all their nice things and feeling like they’re being ripped off by paying the poors more than they’re worth. Being super rich poisons your mind and so they’ll be suckered in by meritocracy and protestant work ethic type stuff that makes them think people need to work non stop to deserve a decent life. So this type of idea, while resulting in a better outcome for them, would seem unappealing because they’d see it as just paying for everyone else to jerk around.

Plus their rich friends who they compare themselves to would make fun of them for making such bad business decisions

What is that blue patch of solid color on the right side? It looks like someone went over it with the airbrush tool in MS paint. Would Ai leave that or has someone covered up something?

“They who can give up collecting STDs to obtain ultra HD goon sessions deserves neither syphilis nor goonery” - Ben Coomlin